Cryo-electron microscopy of vitrified specimens was just emerging as a practical method
when Richard Henderson proposed that we should teach an EMBO course on the new
technique. The request seemed to come too early because at that moment the method
looked more like a laboratory game than a useful tool. However, during the months which
ellapsed before the start of the course, several of the major difficulties associated with
electron microscopy of vitrified specimens found surprisingly elegant solutions or simply …

We are using and developing cryo‐electron microscopy of vitrified specimens. Our main
interests concern the structure of muscle and muscular components. Micrographs which
generally contain periodic features are analyzed by numerical image processing methods.
To detect artifacts induced by the electron microscopy techniques, we correlate our results to
those obtained by X‐ray diffraction. In this paper, we describe our approach to the study of
bulk specimens. Vitrification of such specimens is assessed by cryo‐X‐ray diffraction …