Folding Forum

I just stumbled onto this article over at TR:

Electron Holography Produces First Image of a Single Protein
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27520/

Sounds promising. Doesn't this dismiss some of Rosetta@Home's work? One of their goals is cheaply finding protein structues. That is IF this technique can do what the researchers promise.

JonazzDJ wrote:Sounds promising. Doesn't this dismiss some of Rosetta@Home's work? One of their goals is cheaply finding protein structues. That is IF this technique can do what the researchers promise.

Rosetta@home is one of the best protein structure predictors out there. It will be quite a challenge to render them less important, even obsolete. No, I think Rosetta still is going to be there working away on predicting all the structures in the Protein Data Bank. They should be complementing each other I think.

I don't know much about how Rosetta works but I don't see how an image will be equivalent to a mathematical model. That doesn't take anything away from the accomplishments of the imaging team. Rosetta probably identifies details of the internal structure whereas the e-beam image probably just identifies the external structure. Certainly the external structure is very important, but I suspect that in many ways the two approaches are complementary.

Thanks for your answers!