Schrodinger's what is life? .. to... photo 51... to alpha fold's achievement last month
In 1940 Erwin Schrödinger helped launch the new field of biophysics with a lecture engagingly titled "What is Life?" In his Dublin lectures, Schrödinger addressed what puzzled many students: why biology was treated as a subject completely separate from physics and chemistry: frogs, fruit flies, and cells on one side, atoms and molecules, electricity and magnetism, on the other. The time had come, Schrödinger declared from his Irish platform, to think of living organisms in terms of their molecular and atomic structure. There was no great divide between the living and nonliving; they all obey the same laws of physics and chemistry. He put a physicist's question to biology. If entropy is (according to the second law of thermodynamics) things falling apart, the natural disintegration of order into disorder, why don't genes decay? Why are they instead passed intact from generation to generation? He gave his own answer. "Life" is matter that is doing something. The technical term is metabolism "eating, drinking, breathing, assimilating, replicating, avoiding entropy. The lectures were published as a book the following year, ready for physicists to read as the war ended and they looked for new frontiers to explore. What Is Life? - a small book that started a revolution (excerpts from "Before Watson and Crick - Brenda Maddox") Image Source :: Irishtimes.com
1 of 8 : X-ray diffraction technique to Colorful 3d
5. Year 1984 :: John Rosenberg of the University of Pittsburgh completed the first visualization of a protein/DNA complex—a molecule of DNA and a molecule of protein bound together.
6. Year 2001 :: several research groups were able to get structures of a ribosome—a very complex nucleic acid structure and an enormous protein-RNA complex that is responsible for synthesizing proteins. |
1. Year 1952 :: Franklin's Photo 51 shows the mysterious "X" shape that inspired Watson and Crick to visualize the double helix structure of DNA. She was able to get this remarkable image—the clearest image of DNA ever created up until that time—with her advanced techniques of X-ray diffraction.
2. Year 1973 :: Alexander Rich of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology obtained the first atomic-level image of transfer RNA. (This form of ribonucleic acid transfers a particular amino acid to a cell's ribosome during protein synthesis.) 3. Year 1979 :: Rich used the same diffraction technique to get an image of a small piece of DNA (six base pairs). The image confirmed Watson and Crick's proposed structure, except for one major difference. The photo showed that the helical structure bore a left-handed turn, while Watson and Crick's structure called for a right-handed turn. 4. Year 1980 :: Richard Dickerson obtained another atomic level image at UCLA. Dickerson used a larger piece of DNA with 10 base pairs, or a full helical unit. This image revealed a right-handed helical structure. |
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Professor Elspeth Garman take us on a journey into the world of crystallography - from protein production and purification to growing the right type of crystals.
In her laboratory at the University of Oxford Elspeth introduces us to some of the tricks of the trade, key techinques and the machines that help her team grow crystals ready for X-ray analysis at specialist facilities like Diamond Light Source. |
2 of 8: world of crystallography
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An exploration of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid.
Crystallography: X-ray crystallography is arguably one of the greatest innovations of the twentieth century, but not that many people know what it is or how it came about. An animated journey through the 100 year history of crystallography -- from the pioneering work of William and Lawrence Bragg in 1913 to the surface of Mars! Narrated by structural biologist Stephen Curry. The film explores the extraordinary history of crystallography. To date 28 Nobel Prizes have been awarded to projects related to the field and X-ray crystallography remains the foremost technique in determining the structures of a huge range of complex molecules. 
Intrigued? learn more about the structure of Amino-acids and their importance here..
Learn about peptides here.. Learn about why peptides are important? here.. Learn about the new field of Bioinformatics here Dr. John Moult started CASP to bring more rigor to protein folding efforts.
The event challenges teams to predict the structures of proteins that have been solved using experimental methods, but for which the structures have not been made public. AlphaFold trained itself to recognize the relationship between the amino acid sequence and protein structure using existing databases. Then, it used a neural network (a computer algorithm modeled on the way the human brain processes information) to iteratively improve its prediction of the unpublished protein structures.
The AlphaFold code used at CASP13 is available on Github here for anyone interested in learning more or replicating its results.
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3 of 8: celebrating the history of crystallography
4 of 6: Creating an image similar to photo 51 at the lab
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