Biophysical Society Newsletter
8
february
2014
information,” said Collins in a press release an-
nouncing the appointment.
Prior to coming to the NIH, Bourne was Associ-
ate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Industry
Alliances and a Professor in professor of pharmacol-
ogy at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharma-
ceutical Sciences at the University of California,
San Diego. He also is the Associate Director
of the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bio-
informatics (RCSB) Protein Data Bank and has
published over 300 papers and five books. Bourne
received his PhD from The Flinders University
in South Australia.
Congressman Wolf
Announces Retirement
Congressman
Frank Wolf
announced that he will
not seek re-election and will retire at the end of
his term in January 2015. As Chairman of the
Appropriations Subcommittee for Commerce,
Justice, Science, and Related Agencies, Wolf
oversees the committee responsible for providing
annual appropriations for the NSF, NASA, and
the Office of Science and Technology Policy. In
this position, he has been a supporter of federal
funding for science.
Subgroups
IDP
We recently had the wonderful opportunity to
speak with
Peter Wright
about the history and
future of the IDP field. Wright is a Professor in the
Department of Integrative Structural and Compu-
tational Biology at the Scripps Research Institute
in La Jolla; he published seminal works in the IDP
literature and has been instrumental in the evolu-
tion of the field. An excerpt from the interview is
provided here. To read the full article, go to the
Subgroups page on
, select IDP,
then select the link IDP Articles of Interest.
Q.
Can you describe the initial reception to
the idea of IDPs having function in their
disordered state?
Complete and utter skepticism! There was the
thought that IDPs wouldn’t survive in the cell...
The dogma that prevailed was that structure equals
function, and that recognition was by lock and
key. Those ideas were firmly ingrained in the com-
munity, and they didn’t see that disorder had any
role in biology.
What changed that view is the huge number of
examples of IDPS that have been identified and
studied in detail. There’s been an explosion of
data over the last few years on proteins that are
clearly disordered and have extremely important
biological functions.
Q:
Where do you think IDP research will
go in the future?
One important thing is development of tech-
nologies to characterize full-length proteins. Huge
numbers of eukaryotic proteins have both globular
domains and disordered regions. How do we
characterize these, beyond reduction domain by
domain, region by region, to understand how the
whole protein works synergistically?
The other one is going to be tough: addressing
structural and biophysical questions on IDPs in
their native environment in the cell. Are interac-
tion domains of IDPs always bound to partners
and folded? To what extent are they free and
flexible? The challenge of studying regulatory
and signaling IDPs in their native environment
will be their low concentrations—developing
technology for such studies will be critical.
—
Lauren Ann Metskas
, Graduate Student
Representative
(
Continued from page 5)
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