Ribosome Microcrystals

In 1965 I was employed as a research assistant at the Institute of Histology and Embryology in the Medical Faculty of Bologna University and a few months later, in 1966, I read a paper by Breck Byers that described the results of a cooling treatment on one-day old chick embryos (Byers 1966). More precisely, Byers discovered that an incubation of the eggs at 4 °C for 24 h was inducing in the embryonic cells the formation of ribosome microcrystals. I was immediately attracted by this discovery because it was the proof that ribosomes can form crystals and getting a crystal is the first step for reconstructing a three-dimensional structure.