Center for Structural Biology, National Cancer Institute, Frederick, MD, USA.
FEBS J. 2021 Oct;288(20):5786-5787. doi: 10.1111/febs.15822. Epub 2021 Mar 24.
The motto of this Virtual Issue of The FEBS Journal is a paraphrase of the statement made in 1897 by Mark Twain, which is usually quoted as 'Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated'. With the incredible progress in the utilization of cryo-EM for the determination of high-resolution macromolecular structures that led to the award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank, and Richard Henderson in 2017, it became a common assumption that crystallography was dead. However, as this Virtual Issue should show very clearly, that is emphatically not the case. To put the current relative importance of different technologies of determination of macromolecular structures into perspective, 78% of structures deposited in the Protein Data Bank since January 2020 were still determined by X-ray crystallography. The reasons why that is the case will be clear after reading the papers gathered here.
本期 FEBS 杂志虚拟特刊的座右铭是对马克·吐温（Mark Twain）于 1897 年所发表言论的改写，其原话通常被引述为“有关我去世的报道被大大夸大了”。随着 cryo-EM 在确定高分辨率大分子结构方面的应用取得了令人难以置信的进展，以至于雅克·杜波切特（Jacques Dubochet）、约阿希姆·弗兰克（Joachim Frank）和理查德·亨德森（Richard Henderson）在 2017 年获得了诺贝尔化学奖，crystallography（晶体学）已死的观点变得非常普遍。然而，正如本期虚拟特刊应清楚表明的那样，情况绝非如此。为了更清楚地了解不同确定大分子结构技术的当前相对重要性，自 2020 年 1 月以来，在蛋白质数据库（Protein Data Bank）中存储的结构中，仍有 78%是通过 X 射线晶体学确定的。阅读完这里汇集的论文后，原因就会变得清晰。
