Thinking about Biophysics

[Mr_Useless]

@As far as I was aware such algorithms are pretty much rubbish

 

Doesn't that really sum up the great failure of Bioinformatics, that its perhaps the "stamp collecting" compared to the real science of biophysics?

 

@there are also those that actually calculate atomic interaction bottom up

 

im getting way out of my depth here, but shouldn't time and money be spent on improving the imaging techniques in biophysics, to see the "actualities" of just what is going on , rather than simulations? i mean even if these calculations could be done very fast wouldn't we still have a half baked idea of whats really going on inside the cell like shouldn't "visualization" be the first port of call to improve and refine the simulation side?

 

 

like a fantasy machine that could zoom in to the cell and take snap shots of a protein folding in the cell and recording with what other things it interacts , (like think of a satellite, like the earth being the cell, and the satellite can zoom in at any portion and see things in great detail)

 

personally the idea of building such machines to actually see or figure out rather than effort spent in "predicting" sounds a lot more exciting.

[CharonY]

Except X-ray crystallography, which is usually found in the realm of protein biochemistry or structural biology rather than biophysics there are few techniques that let you see protein structures (at least not as a whole). Measure properties (as e.g. binding forces) yes. But structures not so much.

 

Bioinformatics is a broad field and deals with loads of stuff that are way out of the realm of biophysics. A direct comparison does not really make sense for the most part.

[Mr_Useless]

so current technology can "see" structure from a static frozen state only but isn't there a massive gap in understanding as to why it takes so long for a protein crystal to properly form then xray crystallography to determine the structure?

 

may be crystallography will be replaced by NMR as it develops?..It seems current technology can only look at things in isolation , one thing at a time., maybe one day NMR of a whole cell could give us lots of vital information.

 

is the "dream" then to devise technology than can "scan" the cell in its native environment and not resort to "freezing", ?

 

just a thought (a wild and ignorant one) why not develop ultrasound technology ?

i mean if it can give us a picture of living organs why not scale it further down to detect smaller and smaller things?

like a submarine can track things using sonar from such a far of distance why not the same techniques applied to cell biology?

 

i dont know perhaps different types of proteins have some kind of unique "signature" under the sonar scan.which could figure out there structure and also track with what other proteins they interact with..!?