Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Friday, May 9, 2014

Final Four

The Final Four is set! Who will be the champion of 2014?


Voting ends at noon on Tuesday.

Final Four:



Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Elite 8

It's time for the regional finals! Which proteins will make the Final Four?

Voting ends at noon on Friday. Contact arnoys_at_calvin_dot_edu if you'd like to participate in the voting.

Linus Pauling Regional:


Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Regional:



Christian Anfinsen Regional:


Max Perutz Regional:



Monday, May 5, 2014

Sweet 16

After a tough first round, many very good proteins have been left behind. Such is the nature of a single knockout tournament.

Here are the matchups for the Sweet 16. Voting ends at noon on Wednesday. Contact arnoys_at_calvin_dot_edu if you'd like to participate in the voting.

Linus Pauling Regional:


Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Regional:



Christian Anfinsen Regional:


Max Perutz Regional:


Friday, May 2, 2014

clickable matchups for the first round





Anand Divakaran, author of the winning Protein of the Year 2013 entry, holds the Jane Richardson Cup. This was the breakthrough year for nitrogenase after it had been eliminated in the Final Four in 2012.

If you are interested in participating in the voting, please submit your request to arnoys_at_calvin_dot_edu.



The bracket is here!


Thursday, May 1, 2014

stories of the bracket

Jane Richardson was trained as a philosopher and a physicist but soon turned to studies of protein structures. She developed a means of representing α-helices and β-sheets in tertiary structures that is now the standard for protein structures, and she has continued her work as a pioneer in protein structure study and representation. She is now a member of the National Academy of Sciences, among other awards. In honor of her beautiful illustrations that have become the standard for understanding structure/function relationships, the prize for Protein of the Year is named “The Jane Richardson Cup.”

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Linus Pauling won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in part for predicting the structures of α-helices and β-sheets in proteins. He won a second Nobel Prize in Peace for his work on nuclear disarmament and the Partial Test Ban Treaty which limited above ground nuclear testing . He was close to a third prize for the structure of DNA, but Watson and Crick beat him to it.

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Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was a pioneer in x-ray crystallography, and many of the early protein crystallographers credit her work as a forerunner for theirs. She solved the first structures of vitamin B12 and insulin, among other things, and she won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work in 1964.

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Christian Anfinsen won a Nobel Prize for his elegant experiments demonstrating that the information necessary for ribonuclease folding was contained in its amino acid sequence. We know that this holds for other proteins, though sixty years later we still do a poor job of predicting a protein’s structure from its sequence.

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Max Perutz is another giant in protein x-ray crystallography, having solved the initial structures of both oxy- and deoxyhemoglobin and proposing the Perutz mechanism by which hemoglobin switches between the R state and T state to bind and release oxygen. Along with John Kendrew, he received the Nobel Prize for his work in studying the structures of globular proteins.

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Proteins in Red Shirts

What will the first round look like? A few of our proteins will need opponents from outside of our class.


If you don't know the reference, check out What's in a name.