Advances, challenges, and opportunities in structural biology

As Cell, and more broadly Cell Press, celebrate their 50th anniversary, Trends in Biochemical Sciences is excited to promote this structurally motivated TrendsTalk and review articles alongside related content from Cell and other journals across the Cell Press family. Advances in structural biology enable scientists to obtain structural information at different levels of resolution and complexity and to capture dynamics and interactions of macromolecules. However, these advances also result in new challenges and questions for defining and sharing results. Some of the authors from review articles of this February issue of TIBS consider the following questions: how reliable and accurate are structures obtained by these techniques? How do they account for the diversity and variability of macromolecular structures in different contexts or states? How do they represent uncertainty inherent in the data or models? How can the results be communicated and integrated with data from other disciplines to give more comprehensive understandings of macromolecular structure and function? What tools are necessary for the structural biology community to compare and/or integrate data and to visualize, annotate, and share models and information?