DDLS is a 12-year initiative funded with a total of 3.1 billion SEK from the KAW Foundation. Now Björn Forsberg is setting up his own research at LiU, creating new methods to analyze data from cryo-electron microscopes (cryo-EM). These microscopes are growing in their use to understand fundamental biology, since they can now be used to see structures within cells, viruses, receptors and even the drugs that bind into those receptors.
"But you must first process large amounts of data that look more or less like the static you would see on an old TV without decent reception. By some miracle of research this can still be turned into 3D pictures of molecular life with nanometer precision. It’s amazing the first time you see it working. I was a couple of months into my first project working on the alignment software and just super focused on the numbers, precision and performance. But when I actually saw the results, that was amazing. It was right there, that’s a picture of a protein. It felt like it shouldn’t be possible”, says Björn Forsberg.
Starting out at Stockholm University with the intent to teach, he found a deeper passion in the realm of research. This set him on a journey under the mentorship of Erik Lindahl at Stockholm University SciLifeLab. There he developed core algorithms for the cryo-EM software RELION in close collaboration with Sjors Scheres at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. His contributions to RELION have not only advanced the software but have also enabled more methods that change the way biomolecules are studied using cryo-EM. Now he’s looking to do more.
“I think there’s a lot of unexplored ground. With the right resources there’s some groundbreaking research to do”, he says.
And the resources are there. NSC recently announced an expansion of LiUs Berzelius supercomputer, and the national cryo-EM facility is a hub of Swedish structural biology that will look to make the most of Björns research. There’s also close collaborations with research within the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology at LiU. Nicholas Pearce with complementary research in methods to analyze large sets of crystallography data was part of the first round of DDLS fellows, and Björn Wallner and Claudio Mirabello are pioneering ways to improve predictions of protein structure.
“I didn’t end up here by chance, it’s the place to be for this research”, says Björn Forsberg.But he wasn’t always sitting behind a keyboard. He knows how to wield a pipette and just how difficult it is to do cryo-EM in practice, having published research of complex molecular enzymes, and making proteins in human cells at the University of Oxford during his postdoc.
“That was in the middle of the pandemic as well. Next door they were making antibodies and some colleagues were in the early vaccine trials.”
Björn is now looking to make faster and more confident methods that will help if the world is thrown into another crisis, but the study of viruses is just one example of where cryo-EM is seeing more and more use, as researchers look deep inside cells.
"Because the details of infection, injury or disease can’t always be rationalized through genetics or other studies, visualizing it directly is a phenomenal tool. We just need to make sure methods can deliver what we want, so that we can get more from the data”, he says.
Looking ahead, Björn is now recruiting a team to build these methods and future innovations, and with that Linköping stands to strengthen their research in Life Science, ties with SciLifeLab, and international network of collaborations.
