The enthusiastic encomium came to Michael J. Bailey at SDSC via e-mail from Stephen Shaw, chief of the Human Immunology Section at the National Cancer Institute and editor of Protein Reviews on the Web . There are more than 20,000 citations for PKC in Medline, reflecting the fact that it occurs in every organism from yeast to primates. To begin to understand how these machines work, one has to be able to understand the parts.
Computer graphics are enormously helpful in doing so.
We asked Mike Bailey to make solid models for us because we wanted to learn whether the ability to physically manipulate the models would be an important and complementary tool. On the basis of this initial experience, I believe they are quite helpful. They have helped us to visualize the pieces of the machine and to formulate new, testable hypotheses. His vision is set forth in a talk Shaw gave recently in England . His protein reviews site is an on-line resource that features authoritative, short, structured reviews on proteins and protein families.