Macromolecular interactions: tracing the roots

The late Paul Srere used the above as the title to his last publication in TiBS [1]. Two major theses of that paper are first, that the importance of macromolecular interactions is not ‘new’ to biochemistry; and second, that contemporary scientists have the responsibility to recognize previous contributions from other scientists and integrate these findings whenever possible into the new work being presented. The recent contribution to ‘Talking Points’ by Kisters-Woike et al. [2] fails to consider a single example of what is, in fact, a substantial body of previous work that is directly relevant to their principal conclusion – that protein surfaces are of importance in the formation of multi-enzyme complexes. This forum is neither an appropriate nor adequate one in which to document all the previous work that has established the reality of such complexes, and the importance of protein surfaces in their formation. Indeed, that could require an entire issue of TiBS. Instead, we refer readers to papers by Srere [1, 3 and 4] and McConkey [5], three fairly recent books [6, 7 and 8], a web site that provides an entry to the literature (http://gepasi.dbs.aber.ac.uk/dbk/canon.htm), and three reviews of historical interest written over 20 years ago [9, 10 and 11]. All of these, in their own way, provide a sampling of the rich literature that was completely missing in the paper by Kisters-Woike et al. [2. B. Kisters-Woike et al., On the conservation of protein sequences in evolution. Trends Biochem. Sci. 25 (2000), pp. 419–421. Article | PDF (384 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus (11)2] In addition, a series of Gordon Research Conferences (http://www.grc.uri.edu) has been devoted to this and related topics since 1987, most recently attracting more than 100 attendees (http://www.bio.vu.nl/hwconf/program.html). Details of the 2002 conference can be found at http://www.bio.vu.nl/hwconf/grc2002.html