Spencer Bliven

I had a great time over Halloween at PDB40 at Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory, celebrating 40 years of protein structure. I especially like the talks from older structural biologist about the history of structural biology. It’s amazing to see the difficulties the early structural biologists overcame to solve and analyze proteins, as well as how far we’ve come since Kendrew solved the first protein structure in 1958. Still, I feel a little sad that I missed the days when proteins were solved like this:

John Kendrew with model of myoglobin in progress. © MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

A Richards Box, which used mirrors to visually overlay a Kendrew model on top of hand-drawn electron density maps. This public domain image comes from Protopedia and depicts Fred Richards' original box.

and diagrams of proteins were works of art:

Ribbon schematic (hand drawn & colored, in 1981) of the 3D structure of the protein triose phosphate isomerase. The barrel of 8 beta-strands is shown by green arrows and the 8 alpha-helices as brown spirals. By Jane Richardson.

I presented an updated poster with my work on Fold-space [PDF, 3.3MB].

I had a great time attending 3DSIG and ISMB/ECCB in Vienna. The quality of the talks was very high and it was fun to meet so many other computational biologists. It is nice to finally put faces and personalities to names which I previously knew only through their papers.

My work was included twice at the conference. Andreas had a poster and laptop demo of the CE-CP and CE-symm tools as part of his poster ‘The RCSB PDB Protein Comparison Tool’ at 3DSIG. I also had a poster of my own with the rather presumptuous title “A comprehensive Review of Protein Fold Space and the Correlation of Structure with Function.“