Vol.3(2)

In all of a sudden I am very excited to leave a post. After two weeks, I've started to fall for my new lifestyle - sleeping at 5 hours ahead of my usual bedtime, waking up in the morning rather than in the afternoon, enjoying the 45-min trip to my workplace, and starting the day afresh everyday. When I was rushing on the street with the sweat wetting my pants by the time I got onto the bus, I realized that there are many different kinds of faces moving at their own speeds, chatting their own interesting topics, and that's very fascinating to me. I no longer exclude myself from the world with a pair of earphones.

I have to write this down as I find my memory is deteriorating in keeping the moments intact. I have had this fairy tale-like dream that I was marrying a girl, of whom I knew in my dream but was unable to recall after I woke up. Of course, dreaming about wedding someone is definitely not my first time. But this time is special, in the sense that I knew her and saw her face in my dream, and we were faking it to please our parents, or perhaps my parents^^ We were dancing in the church, and then, near the end of the dance, I hugged her close and kissed her. Instantaneously, I fell in love with her and wished that we were not faking it. Boom! It's another morning.

Since I am becoming a member of the NMR community, I would be glad (and of course syok sendiri) to introduce the powerful spectroscopic method as well as to attract attention of my fellow peers in different fields to this highly potential tool for biological research. A simple outlook on NMR is understandably obvious: it is alien, too farfetch, and it is as difficult as is useless to the frontier of biomedical advances. The verdict on one hand is: it is really difficult at first attempt, 2nd attempt, and so on. You just have to keep on trying, at least it is true for me. As I am still learning it myself, I promise I will put up some guides for interested peers who are willing to take up the challenge.

On the other hand, it is in fact already a very useful tool for drug discovery (e.g. SAR by HSQC), while there's still potential in it waiting to be unleashed. Most people thought NMR is only related to solving solution structure of proteins. Put aside the significance of these structures for drug design most often overlooked by the biologists, NMR can also be used to study the dynamics of protein in solution, and probaly in vivo one day. Why the heck studying their dynamics? The term "intrinsically unstructured protein" may be too novel for scientists not familiar with protein science. There are, in fact, increasing number of protein domains being discovered to adopt no structure before they bind to their target proteins. But what the heck is the significance? I would say, the answer could probably lead you to a new perpespective on cell biology and signaling. Knowing from the history, biological research had benefited from technological advances on several occasions, e.g. PCR, RNA interference, etc. In my opinion and to my own liking, methodology development is essential and it may one day be helpful in getting rid of the hurdles and limitations faced by the current techniques in biological research.

Of course, you may question the significance of elucidating the molecular snapshot at atomic resolution. Phenotype associated to knockout of certain gene will immediately correlate it as a component of the pathway; keep on screening for the most efficient isotype in the serum of a challenged animal will eventually get you the gold-mining blocker. Why care about designing proteins? Biological system is robust and specific at the same time. Sometimes, you could solve the problem without any delicacy, just by shooting the culprit with an antibody bullet. It may not always work. Scientists have been scratching thier heads figuring out how and where in the neurons is the PrPC being transformed, and many groups are dedicating their 24/7 to look for the "Protein-X". Of course, I do not have the answer, but I just think that maybe the answer could be revealed by looking at the PrPC conversion at atomic level. I mean, the scientific community has to be coorperative as well as working in different directions as individuals. So, here I come. I hope to equip myself with the technique of NMR and being able to design an useful NMR experiment in the future to solve unforeseen problem. Lastly, as my last resort to convince you guys about its contribution, I would like to refresh your memory on these respectable Nobel laureates:

(Physics 1952) F. Bloch & E.M. Purcell: for the development of new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements

(Chemistry 1991) R.R. Ernst: for the development of Fourier Transform NMR

(Chemistry 2002) K. Wüthrich: for the development of resonance sequential assignment in structure determination

(Physiology or Medicine 2003) P.C. Lauterbur & S.P. Mansfield: for their discoveries of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)