Biophysical Newsletter - February 2014

8

Biophysical Society Newsletter

2014

february

Q. Can you describe the initial reception to the idea of IDPs having function in their disordered state? Complete and utter skepticism! There was the thought that IDPs wouldn’t survive in the cell... The dogma that prevailed was that structure equals function, and that recognition was by lock and key. Those ideas were firmly ingrained in the com- munity, and they didn’t see that disorder had any role in biology. What changed that view is the huge number of examples of IDPS that have been identified and studied in detail. There’s been an explosion of data over the last few years on proteins that are clearly disordered and have extremely important biological functions. Q: Where do you think IDP research will go in the future? One important thing is development of tech- nologies to characterize full-length proteins. Huge numbers of eukaryotic proteins have both globular domains and disordered regions. How do we characterize these, beyond reduction domain by domain, region by region, to understand how the whole protein works synergistically? The other one is going to be tough: addressing structural and biophysical questions on IDPs in their native environment in the cell. Are interac- tion domains of IDPs always bound to partners and folded? To what extent are they free and flexible? The challenge of studying regulatory and signaling IDPs in their native environment will be their low concentrations—developing technology for such studies will be critical. — Lauren Ann Metskas , Graduate Student Representative

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information,” said Collins in a press release an- nouncing the appointment. Prior to coming to the NIH, Bourne was Associ- ate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Industry Alliances and a Professor in professor of pharmacol- ogy at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharma- ceutical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. He also is the Associate Director of the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bio- informatics (RCSB) Protein Data Bank and has published over 300 papers and five books. Bourne received his PhD from The Flinders University in South Australia. Congressman Wolf Announces Retirement Congressman Frank Wolf announced that he will not seek re-election and will retire at the end of his term in January 2015. As Chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee for Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies, Wolf oversees the committee responsible for providing annual appropriations for the NSF, NASA, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. In this position, he has been a supporter of federal funding for science. Subgroups IDP We recently had the wonderful opportunity to speak with Peter Wright about the history and future of the IDP field. Wright is a Professor in the Department of Integrative Structural and Compu- tational Biology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla; he published seminal works in the IDP literature and has been instrumental in the evolu- tion of the field. An excerpt from the interview is provided here. To read the full article, go to the Subgroups page on www.biophysics.org, select IDP, then select the link IDP Articles of Interest.

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