Oh wow, talk about challenging a community to confront their own worst
fears of stagnation and irrelevance! Hehe - never mind cat in the
pigeons, more like a man-eating tiger in a shanty-town.
Wouldn't top of the list be "dwindling budget priority"? :-)
But okay, back to specifically structural biology and what you think
your examiners will want. For crystallography: twin refinement, and
more restraints through automated NCS and restraints to external
structures. Statistical phase improvement is increasingly sweet, too.
And Pilatus detectors.
Then there's recent stuff whose impact will come in next 3 years: an
increasingly fundamental understanding of radiation damage; MR_Rosetta;
the spread of (true) structure-based medicinal chemistry; unattended
beamlines with pre-queued data collection; multi-crystal datasets.
(Sonicc, maybe - if the field has money left to spend.)
Structural biology? SAX is coming into its own, I sense. GPCRs are cute.
Sorry, no "solve-structure" buttons yet; but no matter, until we can
get things to crystallize more reliably than <<20% and a touch more
rapidly, what would be the point.
phx.
P.S. Okay maybe not so stagnant after all. Nice question!
On 19/06/2011 11:43, Lena Griese wrote:
Dear CCP4ers,
after 3 years without working in structural biology and
crystallography, this summer I will have my PhD defence. As I am now
working in a complete different field I would be happy to know what
happened in structural biology the last years worth to mention. Is
there finally the "solve structure" button? The last nice thing I can
remember was the magic triangle. And on proteins structures? I know
that there were some new scientific findings about the structure of
inclusion bodies...
So, news and milestones from the crystallography for a really hard PhD
test are wellcome!
Thanks in advance!
Best regards,
Lena
