 Cambridge’s
Randy J.
Read:
Crystallography vs. Disease
With
the sequencing of the human genome now largely a done deal, researchers have turned their
attention to proteomics, or the large-scale study of proteins, as the next great frontier in biology and medicine. This pursuit depends, in turn, on the very same technology—X-ray crystallography—that Crick and Watson used fifty years ago to elucidate the double-helix structure of DNA. Since then chemists and biochemists have solved the three-dimensional structure of tens of thousands of proteins, a number that will assuredly grow
exponentially in the coming years.
The key to solving structures today are computer programs that use the data from those protein structures already elucidated to help make sense of the X-ray diffraction patterns of those structures still unsolved. And so the more protein structures elucidated, the easier it is to solve the next one. In this business of comparing and solving structures, by far the hottest program out there at present is known as Phaser, the creation of Randy J. Read and his colleagues from the University of Cambridge, U.K. And while Phaser is helping
researchers solve protein structures they had long considered
unsolvable, the program and its predecessors have also
catapulted..
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 U.S. University "Top
Tens": Harvard, Stanford Still Tops
This marks the fourth installment in a series, now having appeared every four years since 1994, in which Science Watch presents "Top Ten" rankings of the top 100 federally funded U.S. universities, based on the citation impact of their published research in major fields of science and the social sciences. The latest two-part collection of listings shows the universities whose research papers attracted citations at a rate notably above the world average in each of 21 fields over the last five years...
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