Comment by valarauko
2 years ago
> What ramraj is talking about: if you go into a competitive grad program to get a PhD in structural biology, your advisor will probably expect that in 3-4 years you will: crystallize a protein of interest, collect enough data to make a model, and publish that model in a major journal.
All of that is generally applicable to molecular biology in general, and I don't see how the field of structural biology is especially egregious, the way ramraj is making it out to be.
Protein crystallization can be very difficult and there is no general solution. Kits that screen for crystal growth conditions usually help but optimization is needed in most cases. Then, that crystal must have certain properties that allow for good data acquisition at the X-ray facility. That’s another problem by itself and months or years can pass until you get a suitable protein crystal and X-ray diffraction dataset where you can model your structure.
I'm familiar with protein crystallization and the difficulties associated with it. What I don't agree with is the characterization of the field as especially difficult, above and beyond modern biology in general. Nor can I support the assertion that structural biology students are subject to special abuse that regular grad students are not.
> ... can be very difficult and there is no general solution
This is true of pretty much any graduate work in molecular biology.
> Nor can I support the assertion that structural biology students are subject to special abuse that regular grad students are not.
I didn’t say anything regarding that.
> This is true of pretty much any graduate work in molecular biology.
Just to elaborate my point: The process of protein cristallization is not understood at a level that allows the design of general and reproducible protocols. This inherent obscurity means that every new protein needs to undergo an ad hoc, heuristic, iterative process to obtain high quality crystals. This is an early methodological hurdle, at a stage where other routine procedures in biochemistry or molecular biology are usually successful.
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In most other sub fields you don’t get to not publish if exactly one endpoint never comes to pass. I know I didn’t have something like that, and most of my non crystallographer friends didn’t.
There’s a lot of structural biology apologists here in this thread. Happy to crap on DeepMind but not ready to take criticism of their own field.
For anyone outside of the field wanting to learn more, check out this documentary: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturally_Obsessed
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I did rotations in multiple types of lab as part of my program and I can't say I ever found that students in regular molecular biology labs had nearly as hard a time as structural biologists; SB is its own class of hell. Given the number of papers published in molecular biology that turn out to be "gel was physically cut and reasssembled to show the results the authors desired" (it's much harder to cheat on a protein structure)...
I think this is highly subjective and that every field has its own special hells. For example, in computational biology it's a lot easier to generate results (when things actually work) but conversely it's a lot harder to convince journals. The burden of proof required to publish is sometimes ridiculously high - I had a paper spend almost 3 years in review.