I have been thinking about this for a quite while, but finally got a kick up the backside. And now it’s done.
With two members of my group I’ve put together a short movie on our research and, thanks to the good folks at Nature Network who enabled video embedding just last week, it is presented here for your… delectation?
What can I tell you? It’s a moving but ultimately uplifting tale of triumph over adversity set in lab in a once fashionable part of London. The production values are sky-high and you get to enjoy my mellifluous Northern Irish lilt.
The well-placed kick was aimed by the organisers of a conference on Control of Foot-and-Mouth Disease that will be held in Sicily next month. Noting the dearth of FMD videos on the internet (how did that happen?), they asked participants to come up with short movies on their research. This is a trend that Heather flagged up recently.
Our FMD work is focused on the poetically named 3C protease from the virus that causes the disease. We’ve used X-ray crystallography (did I mention that already?) to determine the structure of the protease and are keen to pursue antiviral drug development, though this is likely to be a long and arduous road.
The conference audience will mostly be veterinary scientists whose primary focus is well above the molecular level so I have tried to keep the story relatively simple. I hope that the material might also be suitable for a wider audience – and might be able to engage the public. Now I realise that most people around here are already terribly scientifically literate (and in so many other ways too) but I would still be interested to hear any responses. It was an interesting project to undertake – one of the most tricky aspects was how to streamline the story without distorting the underlying science.
(For those without 6 minutes to spare, there’s a cool bit starting at 1 min 50 sec…!)
Thank you for watching – you’ve been a wonderful audience!
Update: 10-10-2008: the video is now also available on Vimeo. Thanks to Eva and Marco for pointing out this higher-quality service.
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I covet your Macs.
Wish I could do that trick with the protein structures though.
Excellent work, Stephen. I loved the protease stretching party trick.
Stephen, that is awesome! How on earth did you all make the video? Please tell me you hired someone. And it has a very clear, lay-person-level explanation of why you want to find protein structure, and how you can use X-ray cristallography to get there. I think you accomplish your goal very admirably.
It looks like when 3C catalyses cleavage, it gets cleaved itself. Would it be possible to deplete 3C in some way (get it all cleaved eg), rather than try to sequester it??
The special effects were pretty cool.
Thanks Guys (and thanks for the free advertising in your post Matt)! There was only one Mac on view Richard – plus an extra cinema display – but that was all that was needed for the video.
The trick with the ‘stretching’ protein structure was done using Final Cut Express which allows chroma keying – I just made a PyMOL movie of the protease with a black background and set that layer in Final Cut to make the background invisible.
No-one was hired Heather – it was all ‘home-made’ but using a combination of off-the-shelf tools. Final Cut Express for the video and to put the whole thing together, PyMOL for molecular graphics, Keynote for the animations and ScreenFlow to capture the electron-density map and model as I was turning it around (in PyMOL).
It did take some planning and I made sure to first write a script with ideas of what images would go with the words at each point. Also the video was shot on a standard camcorder but using a tripod for stability to get away from the ‘home-video’ look.
Heather – to try to answer your scientific query, the 3C is able to cut itself out of the polyprotein (either in cis or trans, it’s not quite clear) but does not otherwise cleave itself. HIV protease does a similar job which is why the protease inhibitors have been successful drugs. However, it’s a non-trivial exercise to come up with an effective compound.
It’s absolute brilliant, Stephen – excellent.
BTW I love Trevor Sweeney’s facial expression, right at the end of his bit to camera as he fades, around the 2 minute 58 mark.
Truth be told, we all fluffed our lines when it came to recording pieces to camera so there were multiple takes. I left Trevor’s wince in to add a touch of levity (well spotted!) – he was good enough not to mind.
This is very, very good!
One technical comment: it’s hard to hear Trevor because the machine is making a lot of noise. (This might be better in the non-YouTube version, though, and I’m also sitting next to an open door with city noises and construction outside, so it might be better for others.)
You’re right that the sound on that bit is troublesome but I only had a regular camcorder with an on-board microphone and there was a very noisy vacuum pump that we couldn’t turn off. I did try to dampen the background noise (with advice from my brother who’s a real video editor) but you can only do so much. Next time, I’ll invest in better gear…!
Pure dead brilliant!I´m confused as to which particular part of the process is Atomic though?
Cheers Mike. Our experimental approach gives us what is effectively an atomic resolution model of the molecule – it tells us where all the atoms are (apart from hydrogens, which we don’t see directly but it is easy enough to figure out where they are supposed to be). I guess I should have given that point a bit more emphasis.
Nice work Stephen. Have you considered submitting this to either JoVE or SciVee – personally, I think the latter probably suits this particular video the best.
That’s a good idea, Graham. I agree SciVee is probably the more relevant destination for this type of material. But what puts me off it is that it seems to be unbelievably slow to stream videos – much, much slower than JoVE or YouTube on my Mac at least. Do you have this problem?
Difficult to say Stephen from this PC as whilst I’ve overcome major technical problems a few weeks ago, video (not audio) streaming generally is painfully slow, regardless of the source.
Now this of course is very much a localised problem on this particular connection (I have a much faster connection speed at work but lunchtime only).
Since my problem is (most prob) down to RAM/ROM on this PC and yours seems to be unique to SciVee, maybe ping a message to SciVee’s tech support
I want to join in in admiration. Great stuff.
Have you thought about disguising your lab as a bank with a pile of toxic loans, and then applying to the US treasury for money?
Stephen: most excellent!! I would be interested what else is put together by other labs for the conference, too – would you mind posting the link?
Really is a genius video! Wonderful. I love the Blondie background as well – highly appropriate! When I heard you talking about your work at the Science Blogging conference, I was tempted to ask if you had ever worked with Jim Hogle since he does a lot of work with polio 3C – then I read in a comment somewhere that you were actually in his lab! We missed each other by a few years at HMS. Hope you enjoyed your time in the Hogle lab
Graham – good suggestion. I’ve emailed SciVee and will post an update if they come back with anything interesting.
Many thanks for the suggestion Bob – I hadn’t been quite that creative in my quest for funding! But I did enjoy Peter Dawson’s letter in Saturday’s Guardian.
Steffi – anyone who prepares a video for the conference should submit it to YouTube and put ‘EUFMD-Erice2008’ in the title. I just did a search with ‘EUFMD’ and there seem to be a couple more additions – in this case, film of infected animals but without much commentary.
Thank Anna! So, you know the Hogle lab? I had a great time there in 93-95 – and Boston is such a great city. We went back for hols there last year and met up with friends we’d not seen for 12 years. Brought back many happy memories.
SciVee responded as follows:
Look’s like we’ll have to wait for them to set up some servers outside the USA to get decent streaming rates.
Well I just wrote a nice, admiring comment but Nature Network ate it. It doesn’t seem to like me since the recent upgrade. Anyway, great video, Stephen. I am afraid I can’t recreate the rest of my comment here, but well done.
Thanks Maxine. What is up with NN today? I hope it isn’t my video that’s screwing things up!
Sorry, y’all. Apparently, there have been some server issues (whatever that may actually mean) today, all completely and inconveniently out of our hands. I think everything should be fixed by now.
Excellent video, and very clear explanation of how X-ray crystallography approaches can lead to drug design and discovery. As a process-oriented person, I enjoyed hearing about (and seeing) the methods required to produce and analyze the crystals; I’ve sat through many seminars that included X-ray crystallography results, and I can’t think of one that included images of the actual crystals. Always wondered what they looked like … now I know!
Thanks Kristi – it’s very interesting to hear what non-crystallographers pick up on. I’ll make sure to include crystal photos in all future talks. The crazy thing is that nowadays, with so-called micro-focus beamlines, it is possible to use crystals that are only 10 or 20 microns thick (see Jingjie’s crystals from July here)!
Fame. At last!
I am preternaturally pleased to see that the video has now received over 500 hits!
I realise I’m coming to the party a bit late this time, but that’s a great video, very impressed! I’m very keen to do something similar for Diamond, do let me know if you get beamtime 🙂
Thanks Sara. The video is now being shown at the meeting that I’m attending (see yesterday’s post) and I’ve had some very nice feedback. Would certainly be interested in doing more and am definitely interested in using Diamond, especially microfocus beamtime.
Day late and several dollars short as usual…
absolutely stunning Stephen. Just amazing. It looks really professional. You all obviously have far too much time on your hands!
Cheers Ian. And I am very chuffed to see that we now have more than 1000 hits! And that YouTube has recently improved the quality of the streamed video.
It didn’t take so long to put together – though there are years of experience behind it…! 😉