Ha ha ha .... Good Try..Better luck next time !!!... Mr. Sehl Oediter !!!
Sehl Oediter wrote:
Dear Crystallography Community:
I am happy to announce the Journal of Failed Crystallization
Experiments, a bimonthly publication that highlights the exciting
field of failed crystallography projects and trials.
As you are all well aware, most scientific journals have been
publishing crystal structures for quite some time. While crystal
structures of biologically relevant proteins and protein complexes
might be important, they really don't evoke the kind of broader
interest as stuff like these massive sequencing efforts we have to
read about in just about every other friggin' article in the big
journals. [Ed.: I mean, what could be more exciting than shotgun
sequencing of the lint that collects in one's belly button?] Moreover,
solving crystal structures is getting so easy even grad students can
do it. It's all point-and-click these days. All the real skill is in
finding some way to clone homologs from every species that ever lived
and getting those damn things expressed before the grant runs
out--maybe one of them will diffract and then we'll have a shot at a
postdoc, faculty position, or even tenure--if the global financial
system doesn't collapse first, thanks to those crooks on Wall Street.
To respond to this broader interest (which I only parenthetically
wholeheartedly share), the owners, editors, and janitorial staff at
Sell Press have decided that the crystallography community has been
sitting on a mountain of tedious data since about time immemorial--or
maybe a little after that, but not much. Moreover, we recognize that
all of the easy structures have been solved and only the hard ones
remain and these hard ones are going to take a lot of crystallization
trials that will serve as fodder for hundreds of pages of
supplementary information--which we will be sure to include only as
jpeg attachments with the hopes that optical character recognition
will catch up some day, making this supplementary information actually
useful. But until then, good luck sifting through it because it would
have been just as easy to include it as an excel spreadsheet or even a
tab delimited text file. Don't make the mistake of thinking that we
can actually use bzip or tar or could even grasp that a pdf is
fundamentally different from a flat file database. You're lucky we are
even competent enough to know how to download attachments from our web
mail.
For our first issue, we invite you to submit your most agonizing
failures. A4 or letter scoring sheets, scanned at 600 dpi, will
suffice for original data. We will also accept pictures of wells with
oil or heavy precipitant. We have decided that clear wells represent
hope for crystals some time in the future, so we can't accept pictures
of clear wells except when the wells have obviously dried completely.
(We relish dried wells, let me tell you--nothing screams "FAIL!" like
a dry well.) We will accept pictures of crystals only if they show no
diffraction or at least display irremediable diffraction pathology.
Clean diffraction images will be accepted only when the author can
demonstrate that their project was being scooped concomitant with data
collection.
Please be aware that the Journal of Failed Crystallization Experiments
has a strict policy regarding data deposition. All data must be
deposited in a publicly accessible database and any journal
submissions must include acquisition identifiers. Moreover, despite
the fact that any of dozens of software programs might serve as a
reference implementation for a data format, we have decided to form a
committee of mostly clueless computer specialists to design a
confusing and unintelligible data standard for failed crystallization
trials. Moreover, we will randomly change the format approximately
once or twice per year. The deposition process will require that your
data conform to our obscure standard. If it doesn't, we will advise
you with senseless error messages or perhaps our servers will crash.
We may even drop your connection so your browser will sit there
indefinitely just not refreshing and you forgot to note the session ID
before you uploaded your data. Tough luck. Start again. Oh but wait,
the page isn't coming up. Restart your browser. Tough luck again. Try
rebooting. Nothing. Must be our server. Try again tomorrow.
To entice the community into submitting their reports, we offer the
following tantalizing abstract (to be published in our first issue
along with the corresponding article):
=====
/The 5-HT serotonin receptor serves as the receptor for the serotonin
neurotransmitter and is also the target of many pharmaceutical and
psychotropic compounds. Here we show that this receptor just can't be
crystallized, no matter what we do. We chopped off the N-terminus, the
C-terminus, the transmembrane region, and even fused different parts
together that had no business being together. Moreover, we tried just
about every crystallization reagent in the book. We used PEG, lipids,
salts, and extreme pH conditions. We tried hanging drops, sitting
drops, batch, dialysis, sparse matrix, and incomplete factorial. We
even produced monoclonal antibody. We tried to cocrystallize with
every possible ligand we could imagine. I had the drug enforcement
agency breathing down my back for a while because of all the crazy
s**t we were trying. In conclusion, don't bother with this receptor.
It ain't gonna work. Do something that's going to get results, like an
enzyme or hypothetical protein from a structural genomics organism
nobody cares about.
=====
/
Thank you for your interest in our new publication,
Sincerely,
Sehl Oediter
Chief Guy in Charge
Journal of Failed Crystallization Trials
Sell Press
Boston, MA
--
Rajesh Ponnusamy
Institute of Biochemistry
University of Luebeck
Ratzeburger Allee 160
23538 Luebeck
Germany
Phone: +49-451-500-4070
Fax: +49-451-500-4068
E-mail: [email protected]
Web: www.biochem.uni-luebeck.de
