tired…
Casey Londergan | February 24, 2010(4pm post delayed due to wireless issues)
I am pretty wiped out now, and I wasn’t the one up until 2am last night… this is what large meetings will do to you. Here is a quick executive summary of semi-scientific observations from the last couple of days.
Mon am: antimicrobial peptides. this is a moving field with lots of current interest that appears to depend mainly on leakage assays (to see whether the AMPs punch holes in membranes) and poorly interpreted far-UV CD data. Definitely still some room for creativity here, and plenty of room for both atomic-level experiments like solid-state NMR and MD simulations of varying stripes (although marrying MD simulations with experiments is going to be particularly hard in this case).
Tues am: amyloids, etc. Lots and lots of recent work in this field with lots of sketchy samples has led to very little actual structural insight into the toxic species in amyloid diseases. This meeting is remarkable for the kitchen sink of approaches being thrown at the problem in many systems with widely varying levels of success.
Tues pm: more posters! Lots of posters on protein dynamics, etc. and membranes and membrane-bound species, with the distinguishing characteristic again being the diversity of approaches taken. My head is now full… time for Frjtz!