Structural Genomics Initiatives
Japan, Europe and the United States have launched several Structural Genomics Initiatives, which are reviewed in the November 2000 supplement to Nature Structural Biology. As with the NWSGC, local clustering has taken place in most cases. California has two initiatives; one is grouped around Los Angeles with the other in Berkeley. Likewise, on the east coast, there is a New York based initiative and another in New Jersey.
In most cases, the aim is to develop and use the technology for a high throughput structure determination. The NWSGC initiative also aims to establish the technology for high throughput structure determination in the UK but aims to focus on a number of pathogen genomes as well as tackle difficult problems including membrane proteins.
| Name | Partners | Aims | Targets |
|---|---|---|---|
| Berkeley | Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory | Technology development Determine function from structure for each 'fold family' |
Methanococcus jannaschii Pyrococcus horikoshii Mycoplasma pneumoniae |
| New
Jersey CST Initiative in Structural Genomics and Bioinformatics |
Rutgers University UMDNJ |
Technology development Drug discovery |
All genomes, medical implications |
| Los
Almos UCLA |
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory UCLA |
Technology Development |
Pyrobaculum aerophilum
Mycobacterium tuberculosis |
| New York Structural Genomics Research Consortium |
Brookhaven National Laboratory Rockerfeller University Albert Einstein College of Medicine | Examine the feasibility of high throughput determination Investigate fold diversity |
Saccharomyces cerevisae new folds |
| Stucture2Function | Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology The Institute for Genomic Research |
Determine structures of 50 'hypothetical' proteins to see if function can be determined from structure | Haemophilus influenzae |
| Ontario Cancer Institute | Ontario Cancer Institute University of Toronto |
Determine function from structure | Methanobacterium thermoautotrophicum |
| The Structurome Project | RIKEN, HARIMA, Spring 8, JAPAN | As many protein structures as possible by 2007 | Thermus thermophilus |
| Genome Science Centre | RIKEN, NMR Park, Yokohama City, Japan | Folds, structures & folds of functional domains | Thermus Thermophilus Caenorhabditis elegans Arabidopsis thaliana |
| Protein Structure Factory | DESY Freie Universität Berlin Max Delbrück Centrum Max Planck Institut Technische Universität Berlin LAROVA GmbH Institut | Characterise proteins encoded by genes of Deutche HGP | Human genome new folds |