news
September 2008 news
PSI in the Spotlight: September 2008
PSI-SGKB [doi:10.1038/nw_psisgkb.2008.7]
This column presents announcements, recent appearances, and other notable news about the Protein Structure Initiative.
At one recent meeting and at one that is about to take place, many PSI Center and Resource Directors highlighted their recent efforts
At the XXI Congress and General Assembly of the International Union of Crystallography, held in Osaka, Japan, in August this year, the PSI was prominently featured. Helen M. Berman, Director of the PSI-Nature SGKB and the Protein Data Bank, discussed how the increase in number of deposited structural genomics target structures has the added challenge of being uncharacterized, and how the PSI SGKB meets that challenge by providing all available information of comparative sequences, and the tools to analyze them, to the global community of scientists. MCSG Director, Andrzej Joachimiak, and JCSG Director, Ian Wilson, highlighted advances made by their respective PSI Large-Scale Production Centers, including the determination and characterization of a combined novel 1500 structures through their high throughput pipelines. Paul D. Adams, Director, PSI Technology Resource, presented an improved method to obtain experimental models by augmenting the experiment with additional scatterers to model bonding effects at high resolution. Finally, Stephen K. Burley, Director, NYSGXRC, described his center’s fully automated, high-throughtput x-ray beamline which processed over 10,000 structures in the year 2007. (For more information and full abstracts for all lectures, visit http://www.iucr2008.jp/)
At this year’s ISGO International Conference on Structural Genomics, to be held in Oxford, UK in September, our new PSI-Nature Structural Genomics Knowledgebase will be unveiled to the public for the first time by Helen M. Berman, with many other interesting presentations focusing on the NIH Protein Structure Initiative research efforts as well. (For more information, visit http://www.spine2.eu/SPINE2/ISGO/)
