Within the field of structural biology, the study of the interactions of large molecules or molecular assemblies is largely invisible to many of today's graduate students, says HHMI investigator Joachim Frank.

"The students see the strong emphasis on molecular genetics and now the wave of bioinformatics, all of which concentrate on understanding genes and the structures of their protein products. What doesn't get across is that some structural biologists are already, in a sense, beyond bioinformatics," says Frank. "We are already working on understanding the dynamic interaction of the genetic products in the cell. In fact, we're eventually going to develop three-dimensional reconstruction techniques for the cell."

Despite such excitement, Frank says, he and other structural biologists often have difficulty attracting graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to the study of macromolecular interactions, and even some tenure-track positions in this area are going unfilled. Part of the problem, he believes, may be that new tools such as cryo-electron microscopy began to flower after the current crop of graduate students and younger scientists had already chosen their fields.

One solution, he suggests, is to begin educating potential structural biologists while they are still undergraduates. "For example, we've had great success at the Wadsworth Center in attracting students to the National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates program," Frank says. "We get about 800 applications, and we select the 20 best students to work with us." In addition, Frank's group employs promising high school students during their academic breaks. "We let the students assist in a variety of tasks, such as scanning micrographs and processing images, as a means of getting them interested in this field," he says.

Grabbing students early seems to work. "We find that these young people are smart enough that after training, they immediately grasp the kinds of challenges we offer," Frank says. "Their imaginations are fired and, as a result, they may be encouraged to look for graduate

—TB

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Reprinted from the HHMI Bulletin,
January 2001, Pages 12-17
©2001 Howard Hughes Medical Institute