Dear CCP4ers, I would like to solicit your thoughts on the following (this is a real situation, but salient details are changed):
Imagine that you're an industrial scientist in a small company, working on the Bavarian Sausage (Weisswurst) Esterase project. The overall structure is previously unknown, with no good homologs in the PDB, trying to model is "OK not great" so the structure is really needed... Then, you find an article from a large commercial competitor, that somehow managed to solve the Stadtwurst (Saxony Sausage) Esterase structure (which is a very close homolog to the one you need!). Sounds good - but as you read the paper you realize that the authors managed to find a journal that allowed them to publish their work without disclosing neither the coordinates of the model, nor even the crystallization conditions of the protein - all that's available is a tantalizing still picture of the active site in surface mode, with a ball-and-stick ligand positioned such that it is impossible to say what it interacts with. So you sit and ponder - whether to write to the Editor, or maybe to contact the authors directly (but then they would know that you're working on this, which is not necessarily great since you're competing), or to just buck up and do the structure on your own (which feels a bit wasteful). Then, you realize that your friends at CCP4 have a lot of wisdom to offer, so you sit down and pen an email... Any thoughts? Artem ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the CCP4BB list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CCP4BB&A=1
