Update on structures

First an update on the last one:
The structure of EF-Tu on the ribosome has now been solved with a non-hydrolyzable guanine nucleotide, in the true activated state. The metal ion that I guessed might be there is in fact not, but the ordered region of the effector loop is, in fact, ordered. This will hopefully lay to rest the idea that the elongation factors are activated by DISordering of their active site loops, which was always the biggest eyesore of all the models for their function so far. And the contacts with the ribosome are surprisingly simple, involving mainly just two histidines acting as a "ruler" to measure the orientation of the rRNA phosphate backbone. One is aligned in a phosphate-imidazole-water network vaguely reminiscent of the serine protease catalytic triad, explaining enhanced catalysis.

In addition, the number of G-protein coupled receptor structures has been steadily increasing. A friend asked me when I thought that solving new inactive GPCR structures would become boring, and while I'm sure this point will come sooner than anyone would predict at this time, we still have a ways to go. The family of seven-transmembrane receptors is very diverse, and there will no doubt be peculiarities to some of the more atypical members, like metabotropic glutamate receptors or even weirder ones like Frizzled. Yes, I know the last is not technically a GPCR, though it can be made into one quite easily by merely mutating loops, so I think of it as one. And that's not to mention the 100+ orphan receptors, whose ligand identification may be accelerated if we had structures.