Proteopedia and BIOMOO at the Weizmann Institute

I was delighted to receive the following letter, with support from Joel Sussman...

Hi Dr. Murray-Rust,
I’m a student in Joel Sussman’s lab at the Weizmann Insitute of
Science. Joel, Jaime Prilusky and I have developed Proteopedia, a
new online tool/database with the overall goal of making structural
biology clearer for chemists and biologists by linking textual
content to 3D structures.
(It’s best explained by clicking the green links on the main page at
www.proteopedia.org)
We came across your article “Chemistry for everyone”, and felt we
should share Proteopedia with you as we subscribe to the same belief
system of open scientific databases accessible to scientists, non-
scientists, and machines.
We would very much be interested in your opinion of Proteopedia, and
if you would be interested in a userid/password to edit some pages,
we would be very please.
Joel wanted me to send you his best regards, and to pass along that
he is currently abroad and have poor email contact.
Best regards,
Eran Hodis

PMR: Eran – I have briefly looked at your pages but because I am abroad cannot give a full commentary. However this looks potentially a very valuable resource. Like all such it will require hard work but it will be worth it. I am sure you will find people of like spirit in the Blue Obelisk community (http://www.blueobelisk.org) and feel free to ask questions or suggest ideas.
Much of my personal inspiration came from another graduate student and the Weizmann, working with JaimeP, Gustavo Glusman. Gustavo became the caretaker/wizard of BioMOO, the biologists’s virtual meeting place. See http://www.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/PPS95/vsns-pps/technology/biomoo.html for a feel of what it was like. Much of the technology was text-only, though in 1994 we were able to develop “portable” graphics for proteins, using RasMOL and MAGE with eMosaic browsers. As a result we “built” rooms in BioMOO and had a course involving 250 “students” from round the world in the “Principles of Protein Structure” course. Gustavo, Jaime and many others deserve much credit for these efforts – many of the ideas are still very relevant to the Open scientific world today.
So much of what has been accomplished has been done by students and I wish you every success.
PeterMR
NB Spelling is “Proteopedia”