Dear Consortium Members and Affiliates,
We've got a brief winter update for you, as we wind down 2018 and look ahead to the New Year. Read on for details about our holiday break, webinar news, our latest member profile, two new members to welcome, and a couple of publication highlights.
SBGrid and Harvard Medical School will take a break for the holidays beginning Monday, December 24th. We'll keep an eye out for emergencies, but won't sweat the small stuff until after the break. We'll be back in full swing on January 2nd. Happy Holidays to all!
Our December webinar, featuring Nick Pearce presenting on PanDDA was recently posted to YouTube. Watch here. Next up we'll have a look at DENSS (DENsity from Solution Scattering) with a presentation from Thomas Grant at University of Buffalo, Hauptman-Woodward Institute. Details here.
Bil Clemons, from the California Institute of Technology, is the subject of our December member tale. We caught up with Clemons in Prague, where he is finishing up his sabbatical, and learned about his current work adding computational biology to his toolkit to improve the ability to predict membrane protein expression using sequence data. Read the full story.
December brought us two new new members, David Taylor at University of Texas at Austin and John Gross at University of California, San Francisco. Welcome to our newest members!
Member Publications
If you're currently preparing a manuscript, please remember to follow our X-ray dataset publication guidelines to archive and publish your data in the SBGrid Data Bank along with the PDB record deposit and journal publication. Also, please remember to cite our eLife publication (eLife 2013;2:e01456) for all projects completed with SBGrid compiled software.
Two new citations appeared for SBGrid's eLife paper in December. Thanks to Vanderbilt's Tina Iverson for citing us in her new publication in Biochemistry [Abstract], and for the nod from pdb-tools developer João Rodrigues in BioRxiv [Abstract].
Over 20 member publications appeared in journals this month. You can find a complete listing on our website, along with a couple notable highlights below:
- This month in Protein Science a new publication from Peng Gong of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences appeared that agriculturalist and environmental enthusiasts who abhor the widespread use of chemical pesticides will find particularly exciting. The researchers have solved the crystal structure of the Cry7Ca1 toxin of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) and isolated the L1/L2 of the Apex loops for the study of insecticidal specificity and mechanism of host specific recognition. Cry7Ca1 is the only known Cry protein effective against Locusta migratoria manilensis, known to wreak havoc on crops, so having a crystal map of the structure can help in the identification of its host specific receptors in locusts and lead to new, environmentally safe alternatives of locust control. [Abstract]
- In eLIFE this month, a paper by Niraj Tolia of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases works to unravel the role of shed protein EBA-175, of the malaria causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum, in human red blood cell clustering and host immune response evasion. [Abstract]
Please note that not all software applications are available to every SBGrid member type. If you see an application that you would like to use, but is not included in your software tree, please contact us to find out what options are available for access.