Updated: May 28, 2019
As an undergraduate at University of Montpellier in France in the early 2000s, Sébastien Granier’s interest in science was stoked by the passionate lectures of a renowned plant physiologist who studied the architecture …
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Updated: May 28, 2019
When Pawel Penczek took his first job in the lab of Joachim Frank, a pioneer in cryo-Electron Microscopy, he had never heard about the technique. "My interest was in digital signal processing," says …
Updated: May 28, 2019
When Alejandro Buschiazzo took on the responsibility of building a structural biology core facility in Latin America, he was taking a risk. He was an assistant professor at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, …
Published: April 29, 2019
First, let’s clear the air about one thing: HADDOCK, a popular tool to model interactions between biomolecules, is not named after a saltwater cod. “It’s not about the fish,” says Alexandre M. J. …
Updated: March 28, 2019
Genetic damage can set the stage for normal cells to turn into cancer. So it may be surprising that blocking a DNA damage repair molecule can kill some cancer cells. John Pascal became …
Updated: March 22, 2019
It used to be that to book a trip you'd first need to call every airline to compare flights. Then you'd need to find good hotel deals. Then you'd have to revisit the …
Updated: Feb. 1, 2019
Rejection is an unavoidable part of science, whether it’s funding for research or manuscripts submitted for publication. But few people showcase their setbacks like Nikolaus “Niko” Grigorieff, whose lab web site features a …
Updated: Dec. 19, 2018
For Bil Clemons, the first glimpse of a protein structure never gets old. “Seeing the electron density for the first time—it’s still just magical and one of the greatest experiences you can have …
Updated: Nov. 29, 2018
One day, a recently retired colleague visited S. Ramaswamy in his University of Iowa laboratory and presented him with a fish from a Canadian lake and a question. Why was the fish blue? …
Updated: Oct. 29, 2018
But for the luck of a graduate school admission lottery, Sjors Scheres might have followed in his dad’s steps and become a veterinarian. Instead, he headed in a different direction, creating a new …
Published: Sept. 27, 2018
As a physics undergraduate student in Munich, Gerhard Wagner worked on an esoteric atomic measurement of iron in a protein molecule. Then he heard from his supervisor, who was on sabbatical at Bell …
Updated: Aug. 3, 2018
Evidence of the Higgs boson appears as a bump on a histogram resulting from the analysis of data from millions of detectors at the Large Hadron Collider. What if all that raw data …
Updated: July 31, 2018
On a recent visit to the laboratory where he worked as an undergraduate, Gaya Amarasinghe thought about his scientific journey from student to professor. At first glance, his research interests seem to have …
Updated: June 29, 2018
Thickly forested slopes define the environs around Heidelberg, Germany, the headquarters of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. In her hillside EMBL laboratory, Orsolya Barabas probes the small pieces of moveable DNA that define …
Updated: May 31, 2018
Like others in her sporty college town, Karolin Luger heeds the call of the mountains she can see from her laboratory at University of Colorado Boulder. Trail running and a daily 20-mile round-trip …
Published: April 29, 2018
Join us on May 22nd to hear from Giovanni Bussi from SISSA, Trieste and Massimiliano Bonomi, from the University of Cambridge, on Analyzing and enhancing molecular dynamics simulations with PLUMED. Analyzing and enhancing …
Updated: April 29, 2018
After graduate school, Jacqueline Cherfils attended a Jacques Monod Conference, a prestigious small scientific meeting in France named after a Nobel Laureate. She knew no one. Her goal: To find an interesting molecule …
Published: March 29, 2018
Until recently, a vaccinated llama has been a membrane protein crystallographer’s best friend. That was before Andrew Kruse and his co-authors showed that yeast can be a faster, cheaper, and possibly better tool …
Published: Feb. 23, 2018
Cell biologist Tom Rapoport may be best known for studies of how proteins get in and out of a convoluted compartment inside cells called the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). But his personal backstory rivals …
Published: Jan. 27, 2018
If the rhythm of bacterial genes being transcribed was set to music, it might sound like the asymmetric beat of Bartok, a favorite composer of structural biologist and pianist Seth Darst. In bacteria, …