This week, the team at ÀÖÌìÌÃÓÎÏ·ÍøÕ¾ hosted no fewer than seven structural biology colleagues from . The week kicked off with a series of seminars by the visitors (for abstracts see and ) and this was followed by two days of fruitful discussions.
Five of the visitors hail from the group of , which is interested in hybrid approaches combining SAXS with X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy and computational methods to elucidate macromolecular structure and conformational transitions in solution. A prime issue of common interest is the archival of structural information. PDBe is one of the partners that manage the Protein Data Bank (PDB) and Electron Microscopy Data Bank (EMDB) archives, as well as the home of the  archive of raw bioimaging data, which was recently . The Svergun group recently set up , an archive to store data and models of biological structures determined with SAXS methods. The discussions focused on issues as wide-ranging as data formats, data backups, data confidentiality, deposition and release policies, APIs, validation of C-alpha-only models of proteins, and text mining of the scientific literature. Sasha Panjkovich, a so-called EIPOD post-doc supervised jointly by Svergun and PDBe’s Gerard Kleywegt, and Karen Manalastas, a PhD student in the Svergun lab, also discussed their research plans and progress with PDBe scientists.
The other two visitors were and Daria Beshnova, who is also an EIPOD post-doc, supervised jointly by Lamzin and Kleywegt. The Lamzin group applies and develops cutting-edge computational methods and experimental approaches for sample quality control, experimentation and data interpretation in structural biology, with a focus on macromolecular crystallography. Issues of common interest that were discussed include the validation of protein structures as well as model-building and validation of small-molecule ligands in complexes with proteins.
At the end of three intensive days of meetings, seminars and discussions, , who is a senior technical officer in the Svergun group, travelled back to Hamburg with a bag full of new information, impressions and ideas. “As Brian Eno once said: 'every collaboration helps you grow'. Our visit to the EBI certainly helps us to improve and develop the small-angle scattering data bank SASBDB and other projects we work on at EMBL Hamburg. The people behind PDBe are very open and eager to share their expertise. It's been a very productive and inspiring three days.�
