This bring me back to one of my favorite anecdotes.

In the early 1980s, a chemical physicist submitted a proposal to NIH that was assigned to NIGMS.

It received a fairly poor score (~60th percentile).

7/13

Just yesterday @przemekdut.bsky.social showed me an icecream-denoised tomogram. I am no tomo expert but I think that was the sharpest looking f-actin I’ve seen to date in situ, and our protein complex of interest was also the sharpest I’ve seen so far.

In related good news, Justin Flatt (RCSB PDB) said CaBLAM validation would soon be included in PDB validation reports. CaBLAM is invaluable for assessing atomic models refined with Ramachandran restraints and (in the only tests I know of) are a better predictor of accuracy than any other metric.

@sjorsscheres.bsky.social recently gave a seminar where, in a slightly different context, he spoke of spaghetti for completely disordered part of a sequence, but “al dente” for a part of the sequence which solution NMR suggested was elongated, not quite random. Loved that.

The PDB and EMDB do not have nor claim to have nor want to have the authority to decide whether a particular entry should be accepted or published. They see their role as providing information and advice to depositors and reviewers.

Got it. Thanks for taking the time to spell it out.

… manichean, and less interesting than the article I linked, which emphasizes much more the role of government and the conditions under which it can be effective (for spells of history) and covers many more aspects of public life and governance than “just” tech. Still I’ll add that book to my list.

Thanks, I’ll take a look but at first glance the book summary, it’s online reviews and the highlight from that video (the bit they edited for the first few seconds and the dramatic title) make his arguments seem much more narrow (purely about tech and about recent years),…