So I really liked this note (subscription required) from the 13 October Nature:

Elvin’s first brush with resilin came while he was involved in a completely unrelated project. A decade ago, he was working on parasite vaccines for cattle. While looking through the insect literature, he stumbled across a paper by a Danish researcher who had studied the flight of desert locusts and dragonflies.

Wait. It gets even better.

For a year, he and his team tried various methods of crosslinking the protein molecules so they would form a rubbery material. One after the other, they failed. “It was very stressful,” says Elvin. Fortunately, Elvin came across another key paper, published in 1999, that detailed a simple method for making the specific type of crosslink he needed. All he had to do was mix the resilin solution with a heavy-metal complex and a solution of ammonium persulphate in glass moulds and shine white light on them. Ten to twenty seconds later, he got a solid. He was elated. “I was jumping around,” says Elvin.

What I liked about this story was that it’s an example of the scientific communication process working much the way its supposed to. After all, what could be a better example of the utility of the literature than somebody actually using it. “Six months in the lab can save you an afternoon in the library,” indeed…

I would have liked it even better if they’d gone into more detail about the information-seeking process (What database did he use?), but that’s just me.

So, how do we better enable this process? What can we do as librarians to help make more springy insect proteins possible?