PNAS Is Too Slow!
I am not the world's most patient person. In fact, ask anyone who knows me well and my lack of patience will almost certainly be the second or third thing they mention about me. The following should be taken with this in mind.
It seems like ages ago that I wrote with some excitement about a paper that is being published on the subject of how toxic Amanita species manufacture alpha-amanitin. I just got back from lunch with one of the authors of this paper and brought up this research. Now we're both all revved up to read the paper; neither one of us has ever heard of a mechanism like the one described in Amanita. If you're not a biologist of some stripe, I'm it might be hard to understand why... but stuff like this is why we myco-geeks get out of bed every morning and are so often found lurking about the laboratory at late hours. This is the good stuff. This is exciting. I'd rather read this paper than have a roll in the hay with Angelina Jolie. As far as I know, she hasn't come up with any novel synthesis pathways recently.
This waiting is driving me nuts, I must admit. I've been checking the PNAS Early Edition page for the paper all day long, but it hasn't been updated since yesterday as I write this. That's two whole days since the press release came out, which is about a day and a half more patience than I have in me. To make matters even worse, I have to be in a seminar at 4:00 today; it's being presented by a potential new faculty member whose latest research is on quorum sensing in Vibrio bacteria and I think it even involves chitinase. I literally have to be there, and that will mean I won't get to read the paper until tonight or tomorrow. Ugh.
C'mon, National Academy of Science webmaster types. Get that paper online before my head explodes! You guys are just a big bunch of teases, you know that?
