The second point is that authors do not deposit their coordinates
immediately. This is accepted by most people, and it's quite common for
some authors to delay for a year before letting the rest of the world see
them. To make sure that this happens, they often submit them to PDB, who
hold them in trust for a year before making them public.
(Dave - maybe you'd like to add something to this?)
We therefore have a minor problem for the course, with recent
structures. Sometimes the authors will let people have coordinates if
they send a polite e-mail, but usually only if they know them. We also
can't photocopy diagrams and publich them for the course because that is
a breach of copyright. (It is allowed to make your own drawing if it's
sufficiently different). So I suspect tha we shall limit ourselves to:
- text abstracts (we can do this for any paper, so long as we don't
copy the paper verbatim
- drawing our own schematic diagrams (worth doing if you have a
good tool)
- using those structures with coordinates.
I think it would be a good idea for course members *not* to write directly
to authors of papers (unless they have a totally independent reason for
doing so). I'd value other consultants views on this.
P.
Peter Murray-Rust (pmr1716@ggr.co.uk) Glaxo Research & Development, Greenford,UK
mbglx@seqnet.dl.ac.uk, http://www.dl.ac.uk/CBMT/pmr.html (Thanks to AlanBleasby)