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.

thoughts on problem solving

Something I've noticed lately: I've gotten really good at certain types of problem solving that I used to suck at. For example, for my structural biochem class, we were given a couple problems on spectroscopy; one was a MS sequencing problem, and the other was a problem with 2D NMRs, asking you to identify chemical shifts of protons in a short peptide via a COSY spectrum and assign the order via a NOESY spectrum.

Now I helped some classmates with these problems, but that sort of problem is exactly the type of problem I would have gotten incredibly tripped up on a year or two ago. Now before biochem, I had never been shown how to interpret a 2D spectrum or a protein MS. But somehow these two problems were relatively easy for me.

I wonder if the skills gained this summer by looking at 1D spectrums of proton NMRs helped (I was doing synthetic organic research, so I basically was running things and then trying to decipher the NMRs). I mean, the strategy you use in interpreting 2D NMRs is quite different from 1D NMRs. Being familiar with chemical shifts of various protons helped, but I think more importantly, despite the details of the strategy being different, it just helped by giving me a set of learned problem solving/critical thinking skills that extend to reading any sort of spectra.

Well, it's good to know that I'm getting something out of this education thing.