To get to this page, you have most likely clicked on a picture of the structure of the human protein NFAT1 located on my home page at www.jamesstroud.com. I solved this structure as part of my PhD work and I have many stories of my struggles to get the structure. You need to know a little protein crystallography to really appreciate them--so I'll spare you here. But you will attest to the beauty of the final structure, no?
The reason for this page is to introduce you to a particularly entertaining discussion regarding the vote on the nomenclature of the NFAT family of proteins. Until this vote, each member of the NFAT family had multiple names which resulted in a somewhat confusing state of the literature. To correct this situation, the HUGO nomenclature committe set a goal to unify the naming scheme so that new research articles would be consistent with each other.
A first step was to solicit comments from the most prominent members of the NFAT field, so several famous scientists involved themselves with the resulting discussion. If you studied this family of proteins for five or so years like I did, you might recognize how these scientists' contributions shaped their opinions on the topic.
I should note that I also determined the structure of a "related" protein called NFAT5 (picture), also known as TonEBP, mentioned by the participants several times in the discussion. Interestingly, the participants had no knowledge of the structure of TonEBP when they wrote thier comments (1999) because I had not yet solved it (2002). They did have an understanding of the structure of NFAT1 from the postdoctoral work of my PhD advisor, Lin Chen, because he had determined the structure of NFAT1 in complex with AP-1 in 1998, which preceded my thesis work.I provide my own copies of these pages because, as far as I can tell, they disappeared from the internet for at least five or six years, only to miraculously return to the HUGO site--and you never know when some web admin might declare the content obsolete and again vanquish them from our collective electronic consciousness.
Enjoy!
