research advances
October 2008 news
PSI in the spotlight: October 2008
PSI-SGKB [doi:10.1038/nw_psisgkb.2008.8]
This column presents announcements, recent appearances, and other notable news related to the Protein Structure Initiative.
ICSG 2008 Organized by the International Structural Genomics Organization, the biennial International Conference On Structural Genomics (ICSG, Sept 20-24, 2008) brought together many of the world's structural genomicists to Oxford, UK. With the Oxford University School of Examinations as the meeting venue, they shared their research highlights, presented their centers' technical solutions for today's research obstacles, and discussed how to approach the challenges that international structural genomics efforts will face in the future.
Ian Wilson (The Scripps Research Institute) began the conference by talking about the expanding protein universe, what the global structural genomics efforts have achieved so far and where the community should focus their attention next. This was followed by talks that spanned a variety of topics from biochemistry to drug discovery to disease. In one particularly interesting session, intrinsically disordered proteins were discussed, including talks by Colin Kleanthous (University of York), whose structural work uncovered disordered bacteriocins (protein-based toxins) that mimic and therefore inhibit membrane translocations pathway. In a session about structural genomics, systems biology, and complexes, Sarah Teichmann (University of Cambridge) described how homo-oligomeric protein complexes (or “molecular narcissism”) may be a result of selective evolutionary pressures due to the advantages of a regular assembly template. Gaetano Montelione (Rutgers University) described the challenge of biological complexity, and that by concentrating research efforts on systematic structural coverage within specific diseases, interaction networks and metagenomic microbiomes, sequence-to-structure and functional relationships are likely to be revealed.
Several speakers presented innovative ways to work through bottlenecks in the pipeline. Chas Bountra (SGC Oxford) and Stephen Burley (Eli Lilly/SGX Pharma) discussed the benefits of ligand-based or chemical fragment screening to speed up crystallization and yield protein-ligand interactions that hint at biochemical function or even potential drug therapies. Zygmunt Derewenda (University of Virginia) discussed the Surface Entropy Reduction (SER) method as a way to analyze substitutions that can increase the probability of crystallization. This year's ICSG assembled creative ideas, explored interesting results, and provided an ideal forum to discuss opportunities for the future.
PSI funding notice The PSI/NIGMS would like to remind individual researchers that funding supplements are still available for those who can help determine, through experimental methods, the functional properties or cellular roles of proteins that have been only structurally characterized by the PSI centers. The Functional Sleuth feature, updated weekly on the PSI-Nature Structural Genomics Knowledgebase homepage, currently displays over 1,300 structures solved by the PSI Large-Scale Centers whose functions are unknown. These projects will be administered as collaborations with the individual PSI Centers, and researchers do not need to have prior NIGMS funding to apply.
For further information regarding this funding notice (NOT-GM-08-123), please visit: http://www.nigms.nih.gov/Initiatives/PSI/Supplements