Protocols relating to the Structure and Composition of Plant Cell Walls

People have already exploited the physical properties of plant cell walls in, for example, the production of paper, textiles and building materials. In the future it may be possible to engineer plants to produce other environmentally friendly / biocompatible materials with different performance characteristics.  Read more

A story from the Nature Protocols Discussion Forum

A story from the Nature Protocols Discussion Forum

Nature Protocols likes to be part of the on-line community. In addition to the main journal (which, in 2006, was one the first NPG titles to have commenting on its articles), we have the Protocol Exchange, Stepwise (the blog), a twitter account and – the subject of today’s story – the Nature Protocols Discussion Forum.  Read more

Impressions from the Mass Spectrometry Technologies for Structural Biology conference

Impressions from the Mass Spectrometry Technologies for Structural Biology conference

Those of us who did a few months of mass spectrometry lectures somewhere in an undergraduate course sometime in the last century, and have had our eyes elsewhere since then, might find that this field is completely unrecognisable. Perhaps, like me, you did some GC-MS of organic compounds extracted from some matrix or used MS as one of the analytical tools to characterise a compound you synthesised. The extension of these ideas to metabolomics-type experiments, and even proteomics is not conceptually challenging (though I admit that the finer points are rather complicated), but the idea that you could use mass spectrometry to get information about the secondary or tertiary structure of a protein or a protein complex might seem far-fetched.  Read more

Destination Florida: Mass Spec for Structural Biology conference

I am very excited about going to Florida for the Mass Spectrometry Technologies for Structural Biology Conference organised by the American Society for Mass Spectrometry. To celebrate, five of our related protocols will be free for a few weeks.  Read more