Structural genomics accelerates protein structure determination

Thursday, October 28, 2010 - 10:10 in Biology & Nature

Proteins are molecular machines that transport substances, catalyse chemical reactions, pump ions, and identify signalling substances. They are chains of amino acids and the individual amino acid sequence is known for many of them. However, the functions a protein can carry out inside the cell are determined by the three-dimensional spatial structure of the protein. Establishing this so-called tertiary structure presents a great challenge to scientists. There is, thus, a lot of catching up to be done in structure analysis. To push progress, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) of the USA National Institutes of Health (NIH) has invested over 500 million dollars in this field over the last ten years as part of the Protein Structure Initiative with the hope of making significant progress in medicine and biological research...

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