Publications by Marcel Drabbels

Direct measurement of the critical cooling rate for the vitrification of water

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Constantin Richard Krüger, Nathan Junior Mowry

The vitrification of aqueous solutions through rapid cooling is a remarkable achievement that launched the field of cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and has enabled the cryopreservation of biological specimens. For judging the feasibility of a vitrificat ...

2025

Sealed Samples for High-resolution, Microsecond Cryo-EM

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Constantin Richard Krüger, Sarah Victoria Barrass

Oxford University Press (OUP)2025

Correction to: Electron diffraction of deeply supercooled water in no man’s land (Nature Communications, (2023), 14, 1, (2812), 10.1038/s41467-023-38520-7)

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Constantin Richard Krüger, Gabriele Bongiovanni, Nathan Junior Mowry

Correction to: Nature Communicationshttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38520-7, published online 17 May 2023 In the version of the article initially published, Supplementary Note J on determination of the location of the hypothetical Widom line was not inc ...

2025

Shaped Laser Pulses for Microsecond Time-Resolved Cryo-EM: Outrunning Crystallization during Flash Melting

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Constantin Richard Krüger, Nathan Junior Mowry

Water vitrifies if cooled at rates above 3 × 105 K/s. In contrast, when the resulting amorphous ice is flash heated, crystallization occurs even at a more than 10 times higher heating rate, as we have recently shown. This may present an issue for microseco ...

2024

Flash Melting Amorphous Ice

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Constantin Richard Krüger, Gabriele Bongiovanni, Nathan Junior Mowry

Water can be vitrified if it is cooled at high rates, which makes it possible to outrun crystallization in so-called no man’s land, a range of deeply supercooled temperatures where water crystallizes rapidly. Here, we study the reverse process in pure wate ...

2024

Electron diffraction of deeply supercooled water in no man’s land

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Constantin Richard Krüger, Gabriele Bongiovanni, Nathan Junior Mowry

A generally accepted understanding of the anomalous properties of water will only emerge if it becomes possible to systematically characterize water in the deeply supercooled regime, from where the anomalies appear to emanate. This has largely remained elu ...

Nature Research2023

Fast viral dynamics revealed by microsecond time-resolved cryo-EM

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Sarah Victoria Barrass, Oliver Florian Harder

Observing proteins as they perform their tasks has largely remained elusive, which has left our understanding of protein function fundamentally incom- plete. To enable such observations, we have recently proposed a technique that improves the time resoluti ...

Nature Research2023

Near-atomic resolution reconstructions from in situ revitrified cryo samples

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Gabriele Bongiovanni, Jonathan Mark Voss, Oliver Florian Harder

A microsecond time-resolved version of cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has recently been introduced to enable observation of the fast conformational motions of proteins. The technique involves locally melting a cryo sample with a laser beam to allow the ...

2023

Microsecond melting and revitrification of cryo samples with a correlative light-electron microscopy approach

Marcel Drabbels, Gabriele Bongiovanni, Oliver Florian Harder

We have recently introduced a novel approach to time-resolved cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) that affords microsecond time resolution. It involves melting a cryo sample with a laser beam to allow dynamics of the embedded particles to occur. Once the la ...

2022

Accurate time zero determination in an ultrafast transmission electron microscope without energy filter

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Pavel Olshin, Jonathan Mark Voss

In this manuscript, we describe a simple and accurate method for finding the temporal overlap of the laser pump and electron probe pulse in ultrafast TEM. Our approach is based on the observation that the outline of a nanoparticle blurs at time zero, a phe ...

AIP American Institute of Physics2022