Progress in Determining Unique Protein Structures

In a step toward charting the protein structure universe, scientists have created a map of the protein shapes that are repeated over and over again to construct the billions of complex proteins that make up life. The work is part of a 10-year effort to determine 10,000 unique protein structures.

The 3-D map shows similarities and differences among the protein shapes, allowing scientists to visualize the organization of all protein structures and see evolutionary changes that may have occurred over time. The research is being funded by the Protein Structure Initiative (PSI) of the US National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) and is being carried out by nine research groups that include academic, corporate, and government members. The results are expected to dramatically reduce the time and cost of determining 3D protein structures. They will also lead to an extensive inventory of proteins, a valuable resource that will expand the knowledge of basic biology and contribute to medical and pharmaceutical research in the future.

"This new depiction of the protein universe provides a global view of the relationships between protein shapes,” says PSI director, John Norvell, Ph.D. "It has definite potential to help us predict the structure of proteins. Such imaginative analyses of protein structures and shapes are just what we thought would come from the myriad of new structures produced by the PSI.”




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