Archive by tag | proteins

A celebration of cryo-EM

Posted by Allison Doerr | Categories: , ,

Here at Nature Methods, we were quite excited yesterday to wake up to the news that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry had been awarded to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank, and Richard Henderson for their seminal developments in cryo-electron microscopy (better known as cryo-EM) which now enable high-resolution biomolecule structure determination. This is a technique we have been watching closely since 2013, when the first papers (including one of our own) realizing the capability of near-atomic-resolution structure determination with cryo-EM were published.  Read more

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Sunset on the PSI

Posted by Allison Doerr | Categories: , ,

Sunset on the PSI

As discussed in this month’s Editorial, the Protein Structure Initiative (PSI), a 15-year, nearly $1 billion structural genomics project funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), will be coming to an end in 2015. The impact of ending this project should be minimized to avoid the loss of valuable resources and expertise.  Read more

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An all-encompassing term to describe protein complexity

Posted by Allison Doerr | Categories: , ,

Neil Kelleher and Lloyd Smith propose that the scientific community adopt the term ‘proteoform’ to refer to all the different forms that a protein can take. Will the community adopt it?  Read more

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A different kind of Method of the Year for 2012

Posted by Daniel Evanko | Categories: , ,

Our choice of Method of the Year in prior years has tended to be methods that generally didn’t even exist only a few years earlier but which had quickly bounded onto the scientific stage and attracted the attention of a large portion of the scientific community. Targeted proteomics, our choice for 2012, on the other hand has existed for years in scaled-down forms using methods based on antibodies. Western blotting, immunofluorescence, antibody arrays, etc. can all be used to detect and measure targeted subsets the proteins expressed in cells and tissues.  Read more

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