Molecular imaging

The article in PNAS about using magnetic resonance to visualize a virus (which I originally heard about from Derek Lowe's blog In the Pipeline) seems to hit everywhere. I saw it in Nature News, and even in the New York Times. If you look at the image side to side with the electron micrograph, the quality of the image is spectacular. There's even talk about the idea of single-cell MRIs not being too far out of the realm of possibilities in the next ten, twenty years. Wouldn't that be fantastic?

It makes me wonder if crystallography is going to become obsolete at some point in my lifetime. Getting proteins to crystallize is time consuming and difficult (not that I have ever done it!). Not all proteins crystallize and then there's the whole issue of whether the crystallized conformation is really even biologically relevant or whether the crystal is good enough to justify a model, etc. etc. If biophysical imaging techniques at the nanoscale keep getting better and better, who knows what we'll be able to do in structural biology. All that time and energy spent trying to crystallize a protein can be spent studying structure at a different level. It could even be like the boom in the complexity of synthetic organic chemistry and natural products synth after high resolution NMR became widely available.

Maybe being able to read NMR spectra all together will become obsolete and we'll just pull up 3D images of the compounds on the computer after making something in lab. Who knows.

The scientific world is going to be so fantastic by the time I get to really enter it.