I love Faculty of 1000. I really, really do. It's a fabulous resource for a variety of situations. Say, hypothetically you have to write a paper about a journal article for a class, with the only restrictions being that the article you select should be "good", "about biophysics," "maybe have some kind of tech advance", and "not be about anything in your field". (In my case, no "proteins, nucleic acids, crystal structures, or EPR." *sob*) Also, let's say that hypothetically you've been procrastinating on the paper because of benchwork catastrophes [1] A, B, &C and the really cool visiting speaker, and... yeah. So now you have to find a "good" paper meeting certain criteria and you don't have time to sift through all of PubMed. Worry not! Faculty of 1000 will help you find a great paper with a "tech advance" stamp, and it's very easy to sort through various topics. The downside being, every time I go to the website I keep getting sidetracked by -oh, that looks cool, or hmm, is that a technique I could use, or wow, I should really read that! Then I download about 50 PDFs to throw in my "interesting papers to read" folder where they may never be seen again.
[1] S.W.A.M. always says I shouldn't call it a catastrophe unless "Something important is on fire, someone ends up in the hospital, something worth over $5000 is broken, or it sets you back more than 3 months; so don't be so melodramatic!" For the record, all of the above have happened to me at some point during grad school. During such catastrophes, I am incapable of using words as long as catastrophe, so I use it when I can. Fortunately, none of these have happened recently. Unfortunately, that means it's only a matter of time. Once, two of the above were simultaneous. Guess which two for 100 points.
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Ah, the folder for interesting papers that will never actually get read! I have one of those, somewhere. Lately, though, I've been reading while the autosampler works its magic, so I'm not backlogged on literature.
I'd hate to be in your position on the paper, though. It sounds like your field is the cool end of biophysics. Protein folding is so mathematical and physicsy (is that a word?) that it's easy to forget it has anything to do with (ew!) biology.
Yeah, I normally do better,[except I read when the AKTA is running] but the biophysics class has a lot of assigned reading and I'm doing some major protocol re-writes (so I'm reading lots of boring papers on optimizing expression and such).
*I* certainly think I am on the cool side of biophysics--- It's very [physicy? physical? mathematical? quantitative?] Except to get my protein I spend a lot of time growing giant vats of bacteria [such a mess] and trying to purify just the one protein from them. It's kind of like synthesis except completely backwards, if that makes any sense.
Ew ew ew! I'm glad I ran away from the world of bio-stuff before ever needing to culture anything.
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