The power of three

Last month, the Executive Committee of the International Union of Crystallography approved the appointment of Dr Zbigniew Dauter as joint Section Editor of Acta Crystallographica Section F: Structural Biology Communications. This is great news for our journal, our authors and readers. Zbyszek is renowned in the field of macromolecular crystallography. He has been active in crystallography for more than 40 years. He started out investigating structures of small organic compounds with potential medical applications and obtained his PhD in 1975 from the Technical University of Gdansk, Poland, for the dissertation titled The structure of 1-nitro-9-(3′-dimethyl-aminopropylamino) acridine (C283). In time his scientific interests shifted to macromolecular crystallography and he has since been involved in the structure elucidation of over 70 proteins, among them electron-transfer metalloproteins such as rubredoxin and ferredoxin; proteinases from the subtilisin and trypsin families and their inhibitors; various other enzymes such as dUTPases, dehydrogenases, glycosyl hydrolases, aldolases, HIV reverse transcriptase; and larger complexes such as photosystem II or carnation mottle virus.

In addition to these achievements, Zbyszek is probably best known for his seminal contributions to the optimization of diffraction data collection especially using synchrotron radiation. He has published several texts on this topic, presented numerous lectures and seminars, and served as a tutor in many, many data collection workshops. He participated in the development of the protocols for analysis and validation of protein structures at atomic resolution, and he is investigating how the weak resonant signal from anomalous scatterers, present or introduced into crystals of macromolecules, can be utilized most effectively for phasing purposes. He is the inventor of the quick soaking method using halides (bromide and iodide), a method which is now widely known as dauterization of macromolecular crystals. More recently, he has developed an interest in exploiting radiation-damage signals for the phasing of macromolecular structures. In 2010, his work was recognised when he was awarded the highest science award from the Polish Academy of Sciences.

In total, Zbyszek has authored or co-authored about 330 papers in international journals and he is one of only a few crystallographers who have published in all six Acta journals. Up to now he has published three papers in Acta A, eight in Acta B, 15 in Acta C, 102 in Acta D, eight in Acta E and eight in Acta F. He has been a Section Editor of Acta D from 2003 until 2015 and we are very fortunate that he has agreed to join us now as a Section Editor of Acta F. We welcome him to our team very warmly. Let's keep up the good work, Zbyszek!