The main scientific mission of the PSI is to determine and enable ways of making the three-dimensional atomic-level structures of most proteins easily obtainable from knowledge of their corresponding DNA sequences. This mission is divided into a primary goal of determining structures of representatives of large protein families and a secondary goal of solving multiple representatives from specific families of significant, biomedical importance. Under advisement of the PSI-2 Target Selection Committee, each of the four Large-Scale Centers (BIG4) have specific biomedical themes on which to focus their research efforts.

Click on each center's name for a more explicit description of ongoing research.

JCSG: "Understanding the machinery of life" - an essential proteins catalog; full genomic study of over 100 bacteria and archaea including Thermatoga maritima; further investigation of PFAM protein families without structural coverage.

MCSG: pathogenic focus: further characterization of potential novel virulence factors, pathogenic factors, and cases of viral molecular mimicry uncovered by bioinformatics methods, further investigation of protein families without structural coverage.

NESG: structural analysis of protein networks related to cancer and developmental biology; structural characterization of the complete set of bacterial lipoproteins implicated in conferring antibiotic resistance; further characterization of START, Ubiquitin, protein domain families and FeS cluster-requiring proteins.

NYSGXRC: focus on phosphatases from human and human pathogens.