A list of small, useful things (links):
An open invitation to all interested in writing a blog, a hobby that will bring you - The latest from Stellen für Chemiker
- The latest from All Things Metathesis
- 10 year funding ban for a protein crystallographer from ORI
- Interesting Science story on graduate students in biology and mental health concerns
- If you haven't heard the audio of the Southwest Airlines incident, the pilot and ATC are amazingly calm.
Have a good weekend!
My chemistry colleague did his postdoc on enzyme engineering (by using mutagenesis around the active site to improve turnover and selectivity) and he did quite a bit of protein crystallography along with this project. His conclusion was that the research misconduct in the protein crystallography was rampant and that some individuals engaged in stuffing the databases with outright faked data since there was no quality control.
ReplyDeleteI haven't followed protein crystallography for a long time, but I understand that the PDB makes the diffraction dataset available. But if you fake that then there is truly no hope.
DeleteIf I remember correctly (I am not a crystallographer) it is faked best by using coordinates from an already solved structure + lots of imagination on a homologous protein. The serial offenders get caught by being more and more sloppy
DeleteThis makes sense. With crystallography papers, usually all there is is the data set coordinates,and some times structure factors (no westerns, no PCR, etc). Wanna bet that this is being done a lot in certain parts of the world where academics are awarded by the paper being submitted to a high citation index journal?
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