{"id":2842,"date":"2015-10-17T12:23:19","date_gmt":"2015-10-17T11:23:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/?p=2842"},"modified":"2015-12-11T16:53:50","modified_gmt":"2015-12-11T15:53:50","slug":"structural-biology-a-beginners-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/2015\/10\/17\/structural-biology-a-beginners-guide\/","title":{"rendered":"Structural Biology: a beginner’s guide?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got impatient waiting for my latest review article to come out, so here it is<\/a>. The scheduled publication date has slipped twice now without the publisher getting in touch to explain why. The latest I\u2019ve heard, after querying the editor who commissioned the piece, is that it will be out by the end of the month. But I\u2019ve paid my \u00a3500 fee to make the work open access and don\u2019t see any good reason to delay further.<\/p>\n

My review, titled \u2018Structural Biology: a century-long journey into an unseen world<\/em>\u2019, is a contribution to an upcoming issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews<\/a> that will commemorate the centenary of the 1915 Nobel prize in physics awarded to William and Lawrence Bragg, the father and son team that first used X-rays to ‘see’\u00a0the atomic structure of matter. It traces the developments in structural biology that over the past 100 years \u2013 with and beyond X-rays \u2013 have revealed to us the fascinating molecular world that lies beneath our senses.<\/p>\n

As befits an interdisciplinary journal, I tried to write my review for a general readership, which I hope to broaden further by making it available here. I doubt I have freed myself from all the bonds of the scholarly habit of writing but I hope the article might appeal to the interested amateur<\/em>. As a taster, here are the opening paragraphs:<\/p>\n

When Orville Wright took off in the Flyer on a grey morning in December 1903 and flew for all of 12 seconds across the sands near Kitty Hawk in North Carolina, little could he have suspected that by 1969 powered flight would land Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon. Humankind\u2019s first foray onto another world remains for many people one of the greatest technological achievements of the 20th Century. But within the 66 years it took to get from Kitty Hawk to Tranquillity Base another equally remarkable technological \u2013 and scientific \u2013 journey took place, one that has brought us to a very different destination.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1912, in\u00a0experiments initiated by Max von Laue in Germany and successfully analysed by William and Lawrence Bragg in England, X-rays were first used to peer into the atomic structure of crystalline matter. By the end of the 1950s X-ray crystallography had leapt from physics to chemistry to biology and the atomic architecture of DNA and several proteins had been revealed, giving us the first glimpses of a molecular landscape that was no less surprising and no less strange than the surface of the Moon. It had taken just five decades for structural biology to emerge as a fledgling discipline. In the five that have since elapsed the field has grown vigorously, thanks not only to developments in X ray crystallography but also to the emergence of complementary techniques that have used other physical phenomena to lift the veil on an unseen world \u2013 the atomic and molecular matrix of life.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you want to know more, you can download the PDF<\/a>\u00a0(8.6 MB).<\/p>\n

Update\u00a0(11 Dec, 15:46):<\/strong> <\/span>This article was finally published by Interdisciplinary Science Reviews at the end of November. It’s open access so you can now download the journal-fomatted version for free<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I got impatient waiting for my latest review article to come out, so here it is. The scheduled publication date has slipped twice now without the publisher getting in touch to explain why. The latest I\u2019ve heard, after querying the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,6],"tags":[329,328,322,121,249],"class_list":["post-2842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-protein-crystallography","category-science","tag-cryo-em","tag-nmr","tag-protein-crystallography","tag-publishing","tag-structural-biology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2842\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}