Biologists have long known that every major structural technique has its limitations. In the past few years many researchers have begun to employ, by virtue of necessity, hybrid approaches to solve questions such as protein assembly. "The overriding message these days is that structural biology is not a single technique," says Peter Wright of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. "NMR [nuclear magnetic resonance], crystallography, EM [electron microscopy], spectroscopies of various sorts, [and] computation all bring different things to the table. If we want to understand biology, we've got to understand them all."