Re: [ccp4bb] [ANNOUNCE] Journal of Failed Crystallization Experiments

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CCP4bb <-- 1999 <-- November 1999 <-- 30 November 1999

Previous message:
Subject: [ANNOUNCE] Journal of Failed Crystallization Experiments
From: Sehl Oediter sehloediter {- at -} GMAIL {- dot -} COM
Date: 2009-04-01

Next message:
Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] Journal of Failed Crystallization Experiments
From: Adam Ralph aralph {- at -} MATHS {- dot -} NUIM {- dot -} IE
Date: 2009-04-01

Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] Journal of Failed Crystallization Experiments
From: Rajesh Ponnusamy ponnusamy {- at -} BIOCHEM {- dot -} UNI-LUEBECK {- dot -} DE
Date: 2009-04-01

Ha ha ha .... Good Try..Better luck next time !!!... Mr. Sehl Oediter !!!

Sehl Oediter wrote:
> Dear Crystallography Community:
>
> I am happy to announce the Journal of Failed Crystallization
> Experiments, a bimonthly publication that highlights the exciting
> field of failed crystallography projects and trials.
>
> As you are all well aware, most scientific journals have been
> publishing crystal structures for quite some time. While crystal
> structures of biologically relevant proteins and protein complexes
> might be important, they really don't evoke the kind of broader
> interest as stuff like these massive sequencing efforts we have to
> read about in just about every other friggin' article in the big
> journals. [Ed.: I mean, what could be more exciting than shotgun
> sequencing of the lint that collects in one's belly button?] Moreover,
> solving crystal structures is getting so easy even grad students can
> do it. It's all point-and-click these days. All the real skill is in
> finding some way to clone homologs from every species that ever lived
> and getting those damn things expressed before the grant runs
> out--maybe one of them will diffract and then we'll have a shot at a
> postdoc, faculty position, or even tenure--if the global financial
> system doesn't collapse first, thanks to those crooks on Wall Street.
>
> To respond to this broader interest (which I only parenthetically
> wholeheartedly share), the owners, editors, and janitorial staff at
> Sell Press have decided that the crystallography community has been
> sitting on a mountain of tedious data since about time immemorial--or
> maybe a little after that, but not much. Moreover, we recognize that
> all of the easy structures have been solved and only the hard ones
> remain and these hard ones are going to take a lot of crystallization
> trials that will serve as fodder for hundreds of pages of
> supplementary information--which we will be sure to include only as
> jpeg attachments with the hopes that optical character recognition
> will catch up some day, making this supplementary information actually
> useful. But until then, good luck sifting through it because it would
> have been just as easy to include it as an excel spreadsheet or even a
> tab delimited text file. Don't make the mistake of thinking that we
> can actually use bzip or tar or could even grasp that a pdf is
> fundamentally different from a flat file database. You're lucky we are
> even competent enough to know how to download attachments from our web
> mail.
>
> For our first issue, we invite you to submit your most agonizing
> failures. A4 or letter scoring sheets, scanned at 600 dpi, will
> suffice for original data. We will also accept pictures of wells with
> oil or heavy precipitant. We have decided that clear wells represent
> hope for crystals some time in the future, so we can't accept pictures
> of clear wells except when the wells have obviously dried completely.
> (We relish dried wells, let me tell you--nothing screams "FAIL!" like
> a dry well.) We will accept pictures of crystals only if they show no
> diffraction or at least display irremediable diffraction pathology.
> Clean diffraction images will be accepted only when the author can
> demonstrate that their project was being scooped concomitant with data
> collection.
>
> Please be aware that the Journal of Failed Crystallization Experiments
> has a strict policy regarding data deposition. All data must be
> deposited in a publicly accessible database and any journal
> submissions must include acquisition identifiers. Moreover, despite
> the fact that any of dozens of software programs might serve as a
> reference implementation for a data format, we have decided to form a
> committee of mostly clueless computer specialists to design a
> confusing and unintelligible data standard for failed crystallization
> trials. Moreover, we will randomly change the format approximately
> once or twice per year. The deposition process will require that your
> data conform to our obscure standard. If it doesn't, we will advise
> you with senseless error messages or perhaps our servers will crash.
> We may even drop your connection so your browser will sit there
> indefinitely just not refreshing and you forgot to note the session ID
> before you uploaded your data. Tough luck. Start again. Oh but wait,
> the page isn't coming up. Restart your browser. Tough luck again. Try
> rebooting. Nothing. Must be our server. Try again tomorrow.
>
> To entice the community into submitting their reports, we offer the
> following tantalizing abstract (to be published in our first issue
> along with the corresponding article):
>
> =====
> /The 5-HT serotonin receptor serves as the receptor for the serotonin
> neurotransmitter and is also the target of many pharmaceutical and
> psychotropic compounds. Here we show that this receptor just can't be
> crystallized, no matter what we do. We chopped off the N-terminus, the
> C-terminus, the transmembrane region, and even fused different parts
> together that had no business being together. Moreover, we tried just
> about every crystallization reagent in the book. We used PEG, lipids,
> salts, and extreme pH conditions. We tried hanging drops, sitting
> drops, batch, dialysis, sparse matrix, and incomplete factorial. We
> even produced monoclonal antibody. We tried to cocrystallize with
> every possible ligand we could imagine. I had the drug enforcement
> agency breathing down my back for a while because of all the crazy
> s**t we were trying. In conclusion, don't bother with this receptor.
> It ain't gonna work. Do something that's going to get results, like an
> enzyme or hypothetical protein from a structural genomics organism
> nobody cares about.
> =====
> /
> Thank you for your interest in our new publication,
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Sehl Oediter
> Chief Guy in Charge
> Journal of Failed Crystallization Trials
> Sell Press
> Boston, MA
>

--
Rajesh Ponnusamy
Institute of Biochemistry
University of Luebeck
Ratzeburger Allee 160
23538 Luebeck
Germany
Phone: +49-451-500-4070
Fax: +49-451-500-4068
E-mail: ponnusamy@biochem.uni-luebeck.de
Web: www.biochem.uni-luebeck.de

CCP4bb navigation

CCP4bb <-- 1999 <-- November 1999 <-- 30 November 1999

Previous message:
Subject: [ANNOUNCE] Journal of Failed Crystallization Experiments
From: Sehl Oediter sehloediter {- at -} GMAIL {- dot -} COM
Date: 2009-04-01

Next message:
Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] Journal of Failed Crystallization Experiments
From: Adam Ralph aralph {- at -} MATHS {- dot -} NUIM {- dot -} IE
Date: 2009-04-01