Three years is starting to be a reasonable time interval to see interesting scientific progress. On the 1 or 2 years time scale it is hard, as anyone organizing annual meetings will tell you.
One thing I would do is to browse the abstracts of the most recent American Crystallographic Association meeting. The programs for next year are already set by the chairpersons of the special interest groups ... and those subjects reflect what the community currently thinks is going to be hot news. If you email those individuals, they may be willing to talk to you. Same for the upcoming IUCr meeting in Madrid. Possibly the biggest news, from my point of view here at a synchrotron, is the use of the LCLS to capture diffraction from a spray of nanocrystal-containing droplets of photosystem I. The work appeared in Nature ... and if you search the archives here, you will find some discussion. They have essentially completed proof of concept and are starting to look at time-resolved phenomena in these systems now, and they'll probably start work on unknowns soon ... if not already. Just to put in a shameless plug for MacCHESS, I suggest looking up Chae Un Kim's work on high-pressure protein cryo-crystallography as another novel development over the last 3 years. Direct detection x-ray detectors such as Pilatus and MMPAD, are major technological advances that are just now commercially available and rapidly spreading in popularity. Very low noise (both counting and integrating), high dynamic range, high-speed readouts with single pixel point spread function will be the norm in the future. Connection between microbeams and reduced radiation damage is of great recent interest too (Fischetti et. al. at APS, for example). Cubic lipidic phases for membrane protein crystallization continues to make great strides. Also, microfluidics for crystal growth. BioSAXS has been around quite a while, but applications of this technology are just exploding now in the literature, especially novel algorithms that combine SAXS with NMR, molecular dynamics, and other biophysical techniques. Richard Gillilan MacCHESS On Jun 19, 2011, at 6:43 AM, 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
