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Structural biology plays a crucial role in the fight against COVID-19, permitting us to ‘see’ and understand SARS-CoV-2. However, the macromolecular structures of SARS-CoV-2 proteins that were solved with great speed and urgency can contain errors that may hinder drug design. The Coronavirus Structural Task Force has been working behind the scenes to evaluate and improve these structures, making the results freely available at https://insidecorona.net/.
Artistic techniques are essential tools to visualize, understand and disseminate the results of scientific research. The field of structural biology has enjoyed a particularly productive marriage of art and science.
The Protein Data Bank (PDB) is a community resource. But how do we define community, and how has it changed over the last 50 years since the PDB was founded? How did the community influence the evolution of the PDB, and how did the PDB influence both the science and the behavior of the community?