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On Dec 29, 2006, at 9:55 PM, Dean Madden wrote:
Without multicopy refinement, these structures probably never would
have been published. And even with multicopy refinement, a more
rigorous test set based on resolution shells might have been more
resistant to overfitting.
Dean
PS My apologies if an earlier version of this message also arrives.
It appears to have been tied up by the server for several days.
We forget the major issue: 99% of submitted manuscripts would be
rejected on the level of editorial decision as being
"not of the general interest" with the suggestion to go to more
specific journals, good refinement or not. Is it possible that the
papers which are "of the general interest" are of higher probability
to be polluted by " triple cross-contaminations" of various sorts?
And another issue. The papers of this sort ("of general interest")
are taken as being "true" for granted after publication.
I remember a case of a post-doc who interestingly switched from
biology to physics. He was accused by his advisors to be " useless " on
the base of his inability to repeat results related to the "well
documented in the literature" effect. Paper describing this effect
was later retracted by Henrik Shone.
Such thing hardly can happened to mathematicians, working on the
problems with the importance comparable to transporters . In the
moment a solution of an important problem will be
announced, all mathematical world would rush to look for mistakes.
But they probably have more time and less respect to their
colleagues. And o yes, they DO NOT NEED GRANTS.... and they
do not know what the "impact factor" is and according to those I know
are not willing to play this game...
Just a frustration of a defeated old-timer......
Dr Felix Frolow
Professor of Structural Biology and Biotechnology
Department of Molecular Microbiology
and Biotechnology
Tel Aviv University 69978, Israel
Acta Crystallographica D, co-editor
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tel: ++972-3640-8723
Fax: ++972-3640-9407
I was shocked to see the retraction in yesterday's issue of Science
(Dec
22, 2006) of several ABC transporter structures and papers from the
Chang lab, including three published in Science. The retraction says
that the structures have the wrong hand and topology due to an
"in-house" program that inverted the signs on the anomalous pairs.
I have no expertise in ABC transporters, but were there warning
signs in
the structures? Were red flags raised by PDB or the other servers such
as EDI, EDS, etc.? Looking at some of these papers, these are low
resolution structure and I see very high R/Rfree, but there must have
been other signs of problems as well.
In the past few years, there have been almost no structures retracted
due to gross errors and the checks being used by structural biology
community seemed to working quite well - what can we learn from this
tragic and sad error ?
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