Dear All,
Just to clarify that I completely agree with the interest and
relevance of the two papers discussed in the News & Views and with 99%
of the News & Views article itself - it is just that readers from non-
structural biology fields may get the wrong impression from the 2
"was" words in the introductory paragraph...
And these wrong impressions are all too common, at least around here.
As another example, more than once I have been asked by someone if
they give me the sequence or name of a protein (even membrane
proteins), how many days would it take us to provide them the crystal
structure.
Mark
Mark J. van Raaij
Dpto de Bioquímica, Facultad de Farmacia
Universidad de Santiago
15782 Santiago de Compostela
Spain
http://web.usc.es/~vanraaij/
On 12 Mar 2009, at 21:57, Felix Frolow wrote:
Dear Mark
Stay calm
Buzz-words come and very frequently do not stay, they go away with
the artifacts they advocate...
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
Cellular: ++972 547 459 608
On Mar 12, 2009, at 6:14 PM, Mark J. van Raaij wrote:
Dear All,
a News & Views article in Nature 458, pages 37-38 of 5 March 2009
(link below) states:
"The development of structural biology WAS historically based on
the principle of divide and conquer — individual proteins were
purified to homogeneity and their atomic structures were solved in
vitro by using either X-ray crystallography or nuclear magnetic
resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. This approach WAS tremendously
successful, and led to the creation of a protein-structure databank
that currently contains more than 50,000 structures."
I find the past tense here too much...
Greetings,
Mark
Mark J. van Raaij
Dpto de Bioquímica, Facultad de Farmacia
Universidad de Santiago
15782 Santiago de Compostela
Spain
http://web.usc.es/~vanraaij/
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v458/n7234/full/458037a.html
Structural biology: Inside the living cell
