I didn't know about the time resolved stuff, and thats the type of thing that big expensive projects seem much more economical for. Presumably we will learn fou

I didn't know about the time resolved stuff, and thats the type of thing that big expensive projects seem much more economical for. Presumably we will learn foundational (previously theoretical) information which will have wide, lasting effects. The project is so staggeringly complicated that when I've talked to people involved, they knew very little outside of their own minor field (for instance, microfluidics to time droplets with pulses). The way that the project is being sold from the structural side is that you won't need a crystal, which is obviously huge. However, there's the issue of scale, and also the classic issue of... We can't refocus diffracted X rays so we're still limited by protein we can express in a selenium doped media, since you need the selenium signal to determine phase data from the diffractions. The list of proteins that are soluble but won't crystallize/can't be resolved by Cryo-EM is pretty small, and so it's an incremental upgrade no one will have access to, at best. At least, from the structural side.