A veritable downpour

Following up on last week’s post on structures of the E. coli Cascade complex, I just realized that I missed Blake Wiedenheft‘s structure in Science. Blake determined the original Cascade cryoEM envelope (at 8Å no less!), so it’s quite nice that his group also solved one of these beautiful crystal structures. It’s funny how high-impact structures sometimes come in waves. There seem to be many examples in the literature of long-awaited structures suddenly being cracked by multiple groups simultaneously. Is it game-changing technical advances, new biological insight, or just synchronicity bias?