Just found out some scientists like tattoos.
Our contribution:
1) hkl (on the appropriate knuckles)
2) Bragg’s Law (arm)
3) Diffraction pattern (full back)
Send in pictures of your crystallography tattoos for bonus points.
At our university we are required to give a literature presentation. The presentation is 1 hour including time for questions. The goal of this exercise is to help students develop various skills that are valuable in a scientific career such as presenting, evaluating literature and answering questions. Good stuff.
I did my presentation and it really well except to one professor. According to my evaluation, I had confidently fabricated an answer and misled an entire audience. Fair enough, I make mistakes, but in this case I was right and had the literature to back it up. My scores were fine despite this one professor, but I wanted to discuss the issue. I was curious if the book and papers that supported my view were wrong. I wanted to learn.
I went to the head of session and asked who gave this evaluation. I was then told that the feedback was anonymous and they were not allowed to tell me. I then asked if he could ask the professor to contact me so that I could visit their office and discuss the evaluation. The head of session said that would be fine and sent out an email, but the professor never got in touch.
From this experience, I have also decided to no longer give anonymous feedback. I don’t want to hide. If the person who is getting my feedback disagrees, wants clarification, suggestions then great, let’s talk.
Scientific dialogue is invaluable and is reflected in our numerous publications and conferences.
I asked a faculty member of nearly 30 years why the policy existed and was told ‘this is the way we have always done it.’
Does your department give anonymous feedback? Do you find it helpful? Do you know why they keep that policy?
1) Open the desired coordinate files in Coot (click here if you need some help)
(You know you have been looking at structures too long when they start to look like faces.)
2) Under Calculate you have two methods of superimposing:
SSM Superpose (we will go with this option in this example: Calculate -> SSM Superpose…) or LSQ Superpose
Note: SSM Superpose stands for secondary-structure matching and if you need to do it outside of Coot there is a server.
3) Select which PDB you would like to move and apply:
The structures should now be superimposed:
When giving presentations, scientists typically don’t have trouble making their complicated work seem…well, complicated. The challenge is in making your message clear and audience appropriate.
Example:
How does life expectancy at birth and the number of children a woman has change by country over a period of one hundred years?
I felt a table with 8 point font coming on, but instead was amazed by this.
Hint: Hit play
Would making a graph like this be helpful in crystallography? Perhaps showing PDB entries by country over the last 60 years? I realize this tool may not be the most useful to our community, but it’s helpful in the sense that it inspires creativity. I now find myself contemplating how I can present research in a way that is clear, concise and creative. How can I help my data tell a story?
The 2010 American Crystallographic Association (ACA) meeting in Chicago has been able to bring together the co-recipients of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry namely Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath.
The ACA reports that Venkatraman Ramakrishnan will be giving a plenary lecture on Saturday (7/24/2010) and Thomas Steitz will be giving a plenary lecture on Wednesday (7/28/2010). Ada Yonath will be speaking Wednesday morning on Macromolecules, Complexes & Assemblies.
Early registration ends May 31st.
We were able to put together a compilation of 36 resources that publish articles related to macromolecular crystallography. The result is a RSS feed that contains about 1500 articles and is constantly being updated. (what is a rss feed?) If the average article is 10 pages then this feed is currently at 15,000 pages — that’s a lot to sift through!
Fortunately, yahoo pipes allows a RSS to be filtered and only send you those that contain information of interest. In an effort to save you time, I am going to set up a customized feed for you. Consider it my way of saying ‘thanks for reading’.
What do you need to do?
Simply leave a comment with the keyword(s) that must be included within the journal article.
For example:
Sean
Keyword(s): hiv protease, crystallography, crystallization
How does this work?
I will then create a customized pipe from the 26 resources to your keywords and then reduce the number of entries to the 10 most recent articles. I will reply to your comment with a link that will generate your RSS feed. You can then copy/paste that link into your RSS feeder.
I am going to offer this help for the next 48 hours and then close the comment section.
Gordon points us to the CCP4 Study Weekend which is going to have a live feed this year– awesome! The show gets on the road January 8th at 9 am GMT (4 am EST). The CCP4 study weekend is taking place in Nottingham, UK this year and as usual has a number of excellent speakers.
The videos look like they will be archived for those who are unable to watch the events live. For those that tweet @pssalgado is going to be using #ccp4 for updates.
In true end of the year originality here are 10 favorites from 2009:
1) Best Online Introductions to Crystallography
2) Scientific Research in 10 Simple Rules
3) Free Crystallographic Space Group Diagrams and Symbols
4) Ultimate List of Protein Crystallization Resources
5) Scientific Presentation Resources
6) 17 Structural Journals with RSS
7) Ultimate List on Cryocrystallography & Radiation Damage
Covering your Tracks
9) 10 Ways to Comfort a Crystallographer
10) Top 5 Lies of Principle Investigators
X-ray crystallography in a basic sense studies the result of photons interacting with electrons.
How do we describe how photons are reflected?
Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics.
Vega Science has put together a series lectures that Richard give at the University of Auckland in 1978.
Below is a time line with a couple of notes from his 77 minute lecture entitled:
Part 1: Photons – Corpuscles of Light
00:00 Introduction
04:40 Light
09:35 Theory of interaction with light
14:42 Great analogy between checkers and nature
20:20 Explains the theory
23:15 ‘I enjoyed your lecture, but didn’t understand it’
26:15 ‘Nobody understands it’
33:13 Possible meaning
34:45 Describes theory
40:48 Reflection
47:50 Science is based on probabilities
57:10 Answer to the reflection Problem
68:10 Questions
The lecture makes me wonder about the relationship between protein crystal size and the probability of photons being diffracted. I am starting to get uneasy about how much is explained away due to crystal packing.
I had the pleasure of taking my first crystallography course from Dr. Cora Lind. Cora was kind enough to ask me to speak at the American Crystallography Association meeting this year. In addition, she has always been patient and helpful with my crystallography questions.
Recently, Cora arranged for the video taping of her crystallography course.
I have not yet watched all the videos (in total they run nearly 23 hours!), but feel comfortable recommending them since I took the course. Also there are copies of the slides from each lecture to make it easy to follow along at home.
The relevance of the introductory lecture made me smile, ‘you may find publications with crystal data that may not make sense… you need to be able to judge that.’
I am really grateful for Cora putting this lecture series together.
If you find this video series helpful or think the crystallographic community would benefit from more lectures being posted, please drop a comment. Thanks.