by
lmh » Mon Feb 21, 2011 12:32 pm
Yes, there are obviously ground-breaking papers, and there are little ones that are life-changing! As well as beautiful ones that are just lovely to read.
Here's an odd one in the "little but life-changing" category; it's such a useful tool. It's how to make buffers with multiple components, able to buffer over a wide pH range without varying ionic strength. And absolute must if you do enzyme pH-dependence studies.
Ellis KJ, Morrison JF (1982) Buffers of constant ionic strength for studying pH-dependent processes. Methods Enzymol 87: 405-42
For sheer beauty, and cutting-edge, here's one in which someone has labelled biological material with 13C to the point that everything is 100% 13C, thereby creating the ideal internal standard for non-labelled studies, and also finding the amount of carbon in every single unidentified peak in one go:
13C Isotope-Labeled Metabolomes Allowing for Improved Compound Annotation and Relative Quantification in Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry-based Metabolomic Research. Giavalisco et al., Analytical chemistry 81:6546-6551
Other papers that have been memorable for me have been the works of Kacser and Burns on control coefficients, and a load of stuff on bacterial cell walls based on soap bubbles, which appealed when I was a student, but I gather it's all fallen out of favour since.
