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User Tale: Jumping Genes

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 …

User Tale: Data Whisperer

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 …

SBGrid Lunch Break with Giovanni Bussi and Massimiliano Bonomi

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 …

User Tale: Flipping the Switch

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 …

User Tale: Tooling Around

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 …

User Tale: Comings and Goings

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 …

User Tale: Transcriptional Rhythm

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, …

User Tale: The Language of Gene Regulation

Updated: Nov. 28, 2017

To find an analogy for his studies of how genes are turned on and off, Daniel Panne turns to the prehistoric drawings he viewed on a recent family vacation. The famous Lascaux Cave …

SBGrid Lunch Break with Steven Ludtke

Updated: Nov. 20, 2017

Join us on November 14th to hear about the latest updates to EMAN2.2 from Baylor College of Medicine Professor, Steven Ludtke. - EMAN2.2 for Single Particle Analysis and In-situ Structural Biology Tuesday, November …

User Tale: Not Your Average Protein

Published: Oct. 23, 2017

Like many of James Fraser’s scientific interests, his lab motto, “Beer and Tacos,” arises from baseball statistics. A sports writer invoked the beer-and-tacos analogy to describe the false dichotomy between statistical analysis—such as …

SBGrid Lunch Break with Jason Key

Updated: Sept. 21, 2017

Join us on September 19th to hear from SBGrid's technical lead Jason Key. Jason will introduce some of the newest tools available to SBGrid users, including our new user environment and installation tools. …

SBGrid Lunch Break with Jesse Hopkins

Updated: Aug. 21, 2017

Join us on July 25th to hear from Jesse Hopkins, Postdoctoral Researcher at Cornell University will talk about Analyzing Biological Small Angle X-ray Scattering Data Using RAW. Analyzing Biological Small Angle X-ray Scattering …

User Tale: Resistance is Futile

Updated: Aug. 3, 2017

Celia Schiffer | University of Massachusetts Medical School Approximately 200 million people are infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV) worldwide. While novel drugs, such as protease inhibitors, are effective against the virus, resistance …

User Tale: Twist of Fate

Updated: June 29, 2017

Leemor Joshua-Tor got her first introduction to chemistry in 7th grade. The Weizmann Institute of Science had created an introductory chemistry class for the local middle school in Rehovot, Israel, where Joshua-Tor was …

Developer Tale: Pipeline Dreams

Updated: June 28, 2017

A year ago, Bridget Carragher and Clint Potter’s group broke the so-called three-angstrom barrier for electron microscopy (EM). Prior to their work, so many structures had been solved using EM at 3.4 or …

User Tale: Drug Designer

Updated: May 31, 2017

In his lab at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in North Chicago, John K. Buolamwini designs drugs. He’s currently focused on reformulating drugs called nucleoside analog drugs, which have been …

Software Tale: Unstructured

Updated: May 9, 2017

Sit down in front of a newly installed copy of CCP4 today, and you will find approximately 250 computer programs for solving protein structures. The list of programs includes several with catchy names, …

Developer Tale: Stop, Collaborate and Listen

Updated: May 9, 2017

Back in the mid-1970s, the British government funded several collaborative computing projects. Among them (14 in all) was Collaborative Computing Project 4, known by structural biologists as CCP4. "The idea was that computers …

Developer Tale: Mathematically Minded

Published: April 28, 2017

James Holton first got interested in structural biology in the late 1980s at a biochemistry summer camp as a high school sophomore. He was flipping through the textbooks and ran into the protein …

SBGrid Lunch Break with Tom Goddard

Updated: April 11, 2017

Tune in on April 11th to hear about the latest enhancements in Movie Making for cryoEM using ChimeraX. Tom Goddard, Programmer/Analyst at the UCSF Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics, will join us …