Preface

The concept of this book goes back to the Center for Molecular Machines, which I started together with similarly minded colleagues – Nilesh Banavali, April Burch, Steve Hanes, Joachim Jaeger, and Janice Pata, among others – at the Wadsworth Center in Albany back in 2005. The most visible manifestation of the Center for Molecular Machines was a monthly seminar series, which we called Molecular Machine Shop. The idea was to highlight some of the complicated structures at work in the cell, which were coming increasingly into view mainly through the efforts of X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy, and to bring out common features and general principles underlying these biological nanomachines. The seminars were meant to encourage interdisciplinary discourse as it was becoming increasingly clear that no single technique alone could unravel the mystery of how such machines work.

In June 2007, we organized a one-day minisymposium in Albany, which brought together experts studying molecular machines with the tools of X-ray crystallography, cryo-EM, single-molecule FRET, and molecular dynamics. In the wake of the event, Allan Ross, then senior editor at Cambridge University Press, approached me to ask if I would be interested in editing a volume on the theme. Some of the speakers of the minisymposium were receptive to the idea, and by asking other scholars working in the field I was lucky in the end to be able to assemble a team of the highest caliber.