Protein Structure Initiative Advances to Rapid Production Phase

Selection of the centers, slated to receive about $300 million over the next five years, marks the second half of the decade-long initiative funded largely by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), part of the National Institutes of Health.

When the PSI established its pilot centers beginning in 2000, its goal was twofold: to develop innovative approaches and tools, such as robotic instruments, that streamline and speed many steps of generating protein structures, and to incorporate those new methods into pipelines that turn DNA sequence information into protein structures.

Now, the focus shifts to a production phase during which the new centers will use methods developed during the pilot period to rapidly determine thousands of protein structures found in organisms ranging from bacteria to humans. These efforts will facilitate structure determination on a much larger number of proteins through computer modeling.

As before, the PSI centers will submit their structures and related findings to the Protein Data Bank (http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/), an NSF- and NIH-supported public repository of three-dimensional biological structure data.

Message posted by: Rashmi Nemade