

Picosecond Protein Watching - kevin_morrill
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/11/08/picosecond_protein_watching.php

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rotskoff
There are a good number of pico-second resolved X-ray crystallography papers
published. Schotte, the author here, published her first in 2003 on Myoglobin.
Many others have used this since the early 2000s. Other protein watching
techniques such as NMR have been exploited for small time resolution, as well.

The frontier to be talked about is single molecule resolution. Equilibrium
measurements, like X-ray crystallography, are still incapable of picking up
states of the protein with very low populations, which are often relevant to
conformational change.

It can be a bit of misnomer, as well. Time resolution of often means using a
singular value decomposition to pull out populated states from the data. As a
result, the pictures isn't exactly time linear.

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jnazario
interesting. my education is as a biochemist, and my interest was in protein
dynamics. i knew the x-ray guys were trying to get to this, and it was only a
matter of time before they could image and compute fast enough. i had expected
the NMR guys to get there first, however.

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polyfractal
My NMR buddy is gonna be pissed :)

Although to be fair, this appears to be a very special case, where they can
control the motion of the protein with a pulse of light. It also doesn't
appear to measure very small/fast fluctuations of the protein in normal
conformations.

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jboggan
This is going to be incredibly big for the protein structure predictors as
well. Most of the best models incorporate bond-breaking and conformational
switching moves as described in the function of this protein, but the vast
combinatorial possibilities make it hard to resolve what the folding paths are
to the global minimum and which are "unnatural" and leave you sitting in a
local minima. Tweaking their models with real-world input from this type of
imaging and more sophisticated statistics about the frequency of moves will
work wonders for their automated efforts.

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cromwellian
Won't the protein absorbing x-rays affect its reaction?

