One of the coolest things I get to do at MindTouch is learning about our customers. We have some of the most amazing clients who are using Deki to manage and share ideas; seamlessly communicate no matter the distance, update their network, the list goes on. The best part about getting to know my customers is to hear their stories; stories full of hope, vision and passion - about the challenges they face, the successes they have had, and the greater opportunities they seek. It’s these stories that give us the encouragement to do even better for our customers – the ones who endlessly inspire us here at MindTouch.

One such customer is the Bioinformatics Core of the Joint Center for Structural Genomics, located right here in San Diego, and housed at the University of California, San Diego and the Burnham Institute for Medical Research. The JCSG is one of the four large-scale structural genomics centers in the United States funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences as part of their Protein Structure Initiative. The goal of PSI centers is to dramatically reduce the costs and time to determine the three-dimensional shapes of proteins at an atomic level and eventually, to make the structures of most proteins easily obtainable from knowledge of their corresponding DNA sequences. In a general sense, DNA sustains a set of instructions and provides them to direct the processes of life, but the proteins are the central machinery for those processes. Moreover, proteins share some common features in their architecture, such as, for example, segments looking like the coiled coils of telephone cords, and the organization of these features are critical for how the protein machinery works, what it does and when and where. A very small change in the structure of a protein can have a very profound impact, including giving rise to disease or death. I have discovered there is a lot of passion to be found in scientists who study proteins.
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