My feet have been enjoying confinement. I am no longer used to wearing shoes all day (unless slippers or sneakers count) and much less walk the long corridors and panoramic balconies of the Moscone Center. I was extremely glad that I packed a pair of comfy boots, because the Saturday sessions were off to a great start. They sure did not make it easy to choose a symposium and comfortably sit through it all morning. It was a very full first day, between waking up at 5 AM and the evening Travel Award Reception, but I felt truly inspired by the first presentations of the morning.
I chose the Membrane Structure and Function symposium, where the speakers addressed fascinating challenges, from the formation of caveolae to membrane curvature sensing IDPs. Brilliant talks from Anne Kenworthy (Univ. Virginia) and Wade Zeno (Univ. Southern California), where the paramount role of disorder, in domains or IDPs, kept surfacing: challenging a wedge-like classical model of the formation of caveolae, or standing right in the middle of a battle for equilibrium between entropic and electrostatic mechanisms.
As someone who was attracted to structural biology because of the many charms of crystallography, including the photogenic nature of protein crystals and the biochemical information that can be extracted from the many colourful ways of representing macromolecular structures (electrostatic surfaces, by secondary structure etc), I was particularly entertained by a slide in Steve Reichow’s presentation. It was shown to represent the Reichow's group (Portland State University) response to the challenges of reconstituting a complex system such as the Connexin-46/50 gap junctions, which had to be coaxed into lipid nanodiscs. Below an image of a mural, it could be read: the revolution will not be crystallized.
After walking around Greiner Street and Union Square with sore feet, I felt that gap junction channels were as impressive an urban art as any other San Francisco mural, particularly if painted at 1.9 Å resolution in a lipid environment that mimics native lateral pressure profiles. At first sight, the clenched fist and the stern tone of the message could resemble street art, but the intemporal beauty of ‘seeing’ macromolecular assemblies in a native-like lipid environment prompts me to call it urban instead. Not that I am prepared to take sides between crystallography and any other single-molecule technique.