2008 Patterson Award ANNOUNCEMENT

2008 ACA Patterson Award to Bi Cheng Wang

Bi Cheng (B.C.) Wang has been selected as the 2008 recipient of the ACA Patterson Award: “For significant contribution to the methodology of structure  determination from single isomorphous replacement or single-wavelength anomalous scattering data and for its impact on structural biology.”

Members of the selection committee were: Frank Fronczek, Paul Langan, George Sheldrick, and Victor Young. 

In the early 1980s, macromolecular structure determination was a tedious and time-consuming process. In addition to protein supply, x-ray intensity, single point detectors, and computing resources, a major bottleneck in the process was the preparation of the heavy atom derivatives required for phasing.  This is because two or more isomorphous heavy atom derivatives were required for the multiple isomorphous replacement (MlR) method to work.  lt was during this time that B.C. was faced with the problem of a protein (Bence Jones protein Pav) that formed only a single platinum derivative.  Since the MIR technique could not be used, B.C. developed what was to become the first practical method for macromolecular structure determination from SIR or single wavelength anomalous scattering (SAS) data, a process he called noise filtering (also referred to as solvent flattening), that resurrected the technique of density modification. Working at the VA Medical Center in Pittsburgh, B.C. produced a suite of easy-to-use programs, including an innovative algorithm for automatic detection and generation of protein- solvent boundaries, called the lSlR/ISAS program package, which he freely provided to the community (including source code!).

It is interesting to note that in his seminal 1985 (Methods Enzymol,115, 90-112) paper on solvent flattening, B.C. showed through simulation that a structure of a 113-residue protein could be determined using only the sulfur anomalous scattering signal from a single disulfide, provided that the data were measured accurately enough.  Now, 20 years later, structure determination using the sulfur anomalous scattering signal has gained considerable success, and SAS structure determination has supplanted both MIR and MAD as the most common method of de novo structure determination.

Throughout his long career B.C. has also contributed to crystallographic education as Director of the ACA Summer School, to synchrotron data collection as Director of SER-CAT at APS, and technological and methodological advances in the field as Director of the Southeast Collaboratory for Structural Genomics.

Call for Nominations:

Nominations are solicited for the 2008 A. Lindo Patterson Award, which will be presented at the annual ACA Meeting in Knoxville, TN. A special symposium will be organized in honor of the recipient and will provide the forum for the Patterson Award Lecture. The Patterson Award, established in 1980, is given every three years to recognize and encourage outstanding research in the structure of matter by diffraction methods, including significant contributions to the methodology of structure determination and/or innovative application of diffraction methods and/or elucidation of biological, chemical, geological or physical phenomena using new structural information.

Lindo Patterson’s 1934 paper in Phys. Rev.: “A Fourier Series Method for the Determination of Components of Interatomic Distances in Crystals,” signalled a major step forward in understanding diffraction theory; the Fourier series on F2, or Patterson function, greatly enabled subsequent structure determination. His section on Fundamental Mathematics in International Tables, Vol. II was another important contribution to the community. After working for the government during the war, and then teaching at Bryn Mawr, he moved in 1949 to the Institute for Cancer Research where he worked until his untimely death in 1966. Lindo Patterson was President of ASXRED in 1949 and played an important role in the formation of the ACA in 1950.

Selection committee members are: Frank Fronczek, Paul Langan, George Sheldrick, and Victor Young.  Previous winners of the A.L. Patterson Award are: 2005: Alwyn Jones; 2002: Douglas Dorset; 1999: Gerard Bricogne; 1996: Christer E. Nordman; 1993: George Sheldrick; 1990: Michael M. Woolfson; 1987: David and Lieselotte Templeton; 1984: Jerome Karle and Herbert Hauptman; 1981: Wayne A. Hendrickson.

Please submit nominations to the ACA office, marcia@hwi.buffalo.edu, no later than May 1, 2007. The Nomination Guidelines and form are available http://www.amercrystalassn.org/Awards.htm