Hi, >From a very narrow point of view of a crystallographer/protein expressionist, this is an overkill. Obviously if you're dealing with articles in materials science, physics, etc. - not everything is as simple as getting some DNA.
Generally speaking, if someone wants to reproduce nearly any crystallographic results all they need is the source DNA in whatever form. An obvious exception to that would be the case where the protein is purified from a natural source. Special cases excluded; cloning, expression, purification and so forth should be reproducible from source DNA onward. In fact, with the advent and proliferation of synthetic DNA even that requirement is not really all that important - all you need is the sequence, provided that the 'materials and methods' section of the work is well written and no significant details are omitted. The latter is (in my experience) the more common problem than the availability of sarting materials. It is very hard to include absolutely everything into the Materials and Methods. At least half of the published protocols we've reproduced required very significant investment of effort to get right (sometimes even changing expression systems from what's reported). The end point is clear - the crystal structures DO reproduce quite faithfully even if extra work has to be done to get there. For many industrial scientists the following sentence is basically the end of the road as far as publication is concerned: "One preferred form of disclosure is a link from the methods section to a copy of the relevant Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) form, which is hosted as Supplementary Information on the journal's web site." Pharma/biotech companies are typically very reluctant to make blanket provisions of this kind. Are the journals trying to exclude industrial submissions? Artem
