Sunday, October 24, 2010

Ugh.

So the Chargers lost in brutal Charger fashion.  And the paper I picked out at the last minute was painful.  Painful.  So this will be short.

The article is entitled Contribution of Subdomain Structure to the Thermal Stability of the Cholera Toxin A1 Subunit.  It was published in Biochemistry earlier this month.  Let me be frank.  This is a bad paper.  Unless you really like looking at CD and fluorescence data at different temperatures to monitor unfolding and only that, don't bother.  The only figure that doesn't fall in this category is a structure of the protein that was produced by another lab.  Ugh.

The writing was decent considering the data the authors had to work with.  The one conclusion they could make with their data they did, even though the data don't strongly support it.  There was support, just weak.  Good writing can only do so much for an article.

So am I angry at the authors?  No.  This is probably a thesis project that never panned out technically and the grad student needed a publication.  And the writing was good.  The science just stank.  So kudos to the grad student for being able to get that data published.  And good luck in your future endeavors.

So, to conclude, the science in this paper stinks.  Don't read it for that.  Don't read it unless you're really interested in folding/unfolding.  Good night!

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