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The Nobel prize in chemistry has been awarded to three scientists for developing a technique to produce images of the molecules of life frozen in time.

Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson will receive equal shares of the 9m Swedish kronor (£825,000) prize, which was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on Wednesday, the Guardian reported.

The technique they developed, called cryo-electron microscopy, has allowed the structure of biomolecules to be studied in high-resolution for the first time, an advance that has transformed the field of biochemistry.

Before the breakthrough, electron microscopes were only suitable for imaging dead matter, because the powerful electron beam destroyed biological material. Henderson, a Scottish scientist and professor at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, succeeded in using one of these microscopes to generate the first three-dimensional image of a protein at atomic resolution.

Joachim Frank, a German-born professor at Colombia University in New York, made the technology more generally applicable. Dubochet, who is Swiss and an honorary professor at the University of Lausanne, refined a vitrification technique that allowed biomolecules to be rapidly frozen while retaining their natural shape.

The resultant imaging technique has allowed scientists to explore the architecture of everything from the proteins that cause antibiotic resistance to the surface of the Zika virus. Last year the 3D structure of the enzyme producing the amyloid of Alzheimer’s disease was published using this technology. By capturing snapshots of the same system at different time-points, scientists can even stitch together jittery film sequences of biological processes as they unfold.

This has paved the way for both new basic insights into life’s chemistry and for the development of pharmaceuticals.