There are a number of "Molecule of the Month" style mini-reviews on the web, which highlight one particular molecule (usually a protein) every month, in an accessible style. Two of my personal favourites are protein spotlight: one month, one protein written by Vivienne Baillie Gerritsen of the Swiss-Prot team and Molecule of the Month at the Protein Databank PDB edited by David Goodsell. Both these features are worth a quick read because they can help bio-literate and bio-curious users to increase and reinforce their knowledge relatively quickly.
Part of what makes the PDB one worth reading is the colourful visualisations and short descriptions that go with it. For March 2007, PDBs molecule of the month is Zinc Fingers. Meanwhile, over at swissprot, the molecule is Sex-determining region Y protein (Sry), used to illustrate the tenuous nature of sex.
Comments
Off the month
First I thought it was some post about food enrichment, may be I am hungry!
Thanks Duncan for the nice post, I had that PDB feed but somehow never walked that lane! I especially liked the Expasy link which I was not aware of.
I would also like to direct nodalpointer's to the RSS feed for latest additions to the PDB structures, http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/rss/LastLoad .
Ani
________________"The Answer Lies in Genome"________________
http://fuzzylife.org/
Feeds should be useful
I don't think much of that PDB LastLoad feed - it just provides a list of PDB IDs. The other feeds mentioned provide much more useful information.
I've recently been thinking about feeds in this context. RCSB provide a database called TargetDB in XML format which is a list of targets worked on by structural genomics consortia worldwide. It would be useful to have these data available such that other workers could easily scan the list and drop targets from their list if someone else was working on it. Whether RSS is the way to go with this, I'm not sure. I like the idea from a coding point of view - it would be easy to transform the XML into RSS using e.g. XML::RSS in Perl.
Take your protein pills and put your helment on
Protein spotlight also has a feed, as does bio-curious, they might be worth adding to nodalpoints blogroll?
I have changed the
I have changed the permissions for adding weblinks, so now any registered user can submit a weblink. Once a weblink has been approved it will immediately show up in the blogroll.