A roundabout way to obtain protein structural information

In the paper "Rational design of a structural and functional nitric oxide reductase" Yeung et al. describe a way to get structural information on an enzyme, nitric oxide reductase, which could not be crystallised. They mutated sperm whale myoglobin to yield the same enzymatic activity and then crystallised that... Not as nice as crystallising the real thing of course, but if it's the only thing that works...

Following chemical reactions in special crystals

In their paper "X-ray observation of a transient hemiaminal trapped in a porous network" (plus commentary), Kawamichi et al. show how a chemical reaction can be followed in a crystal. Well, strictly, taking three snapshot - of the starting compound, of a kinetically trapped intermediate, an then, after heating, of the product. Impressive, nonetheless.

Relative investments

In a commentary in Science (1 Feb 2008), Adrian Cho wrote that the amount of money awarded in research grants increases much less than investment in construction and facilities operation - a graph neatly illustrates this.

A similar trend may be in operation in Spain - the Government reduced the budget for the Ministry of Science and Innovation, but increases spending in the "planE" - which mainly funds buildings, and lends more money to industry.

What about basic science (knowledge), being the new motor of the economy?

Protein evolution is irreversible

In their paper "An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution", Bridgham, Ortlund and Thornton show that sequence evolution of glucocorticoid receptor is irreversible. Although they only show it for one protein, it may be a general principle. This means that even if evolution was repeated in exactly the same conditions, a completely different world would result, by chance.

La Ciencia Española no necesita tijeras

Or, translated: Spanish Science does not need scissors.

This week the Spanish 2010 budget was presented by the Government - the main conclusion is a deep cut in the budget. For instance, the Spanish National Research Council, will have to make do with 15% less than in 2009.

At the same time, more more is lent to enterprises - yes, lent, not given - to mask the cuts. These loans are presented in the budget on equal terms as the "gifts" to universities, to research institutes (but also companies), and to individual researchers as specific research grants.

This is something the president, Zapatero, had promised not to do when coming to power.

To follow the suggestion in this blog, I post a specific reason for not cutting science funds here:

- Funds for science in Spain should not be cut (or converted into loans for companies as the minister Garmendia is doing), because spending, and output, is still well below average for developed countries.

Paul Kammerer

Although I am not a genetics expert, the Science news article "The Case of the Midwife Toad: Fraud or Epigenetics? piqued my interest. It would be interesting to see if someone finally manages to repeat Paul Kammerer's experiment.

Constraints and Restraints

In the paper "A short history of SHELX" by George Sheldrick (Acta Crystallographica A, 2008, 64, 112-122) is explained very clearly something I did not completely realise:

- CONstraints lower the number of variables to refine, while

- REstraints augment the number of observations.

What follows from this is that for low resolution structures introducing extra constraints (for instance strict NCS) is more efficient than introducing extra restraints, the reason being that you need more than one observation per refined variable.

This is not actually implemented in all crystallographic protein structure refinement programs, which I think is a shame.