Jonathan Fahey  Jonathan Fahey, Contributor  1/12/2009 @ 5:45PM
IBM's Sharp New Focus  Proteins are giant jumbles of amino acids
shaped like a tangle of curled ribbons and crimped strings. But
they are jumbled and tangled just so. How they are built and
shaped determines whether they can help digest a bite of steak
au poivre or play a role in crippling a flu virus.  The
beautiful, messy collection of proteins in our bodies are made
from a mere 20 amino acids. Figuring out what intricate shape
they take, or “seeing” their structures, however, is hard.  Now
researchers at IBM think they may be able to do just that: In a
paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, the scientists describe the results of a
new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique that could give
biologists a glimpse of the tangles and crimps of proteins down
to a resolution of four nanometers (or billionths of a meter).
That’s 100 million times sharper than the best research machines
currently available.