National Cryo-Electron Microscopy Facility

The UK is building a national facility to give scientists access to the most powerful electron microscopes—machines too expensive and complex for any single university to run alone. This matters because the molecular machines inside our cells are too small to see with ordinary microscopes. To understand how they work in health and disease, researchers need to map their three-dimensional structures at near-atomic resolution. Currently, only a handful of labs can afford the latest equipment, creating a bottleneck for UK biomedical research. The facility will operate like a synchrotron beamline: scientists submit proposals, and the best projects get time on the instruments, supported by expert staff. If successful, the centre will accelerate discoveries in structural biology—from understanding how viruses invade cells to designing better drugs. It will also train the next generation of microscopists and coordinate software development. This is primarily an infrastructure and fundamental science project. It does not promise immediate treatments, but it enables the kind of detailed molecular understanding that has underpinned past breakthroughs in medicine, from HIV drugs to cancer therapies.