Structural Genomics

John Norvell, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Maryland, USA
Jiayin Li, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Maryland, USA
Kirstie Saltsman, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Maryland, USA
Jeremy Berg, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Maryland, USA

Published online: January 2006

DOI: 10.1038/npg.els.0004104

Structural genomics is a new field that aims at the large-scale determination of thousands of carefully selected protein structures. This endeavour will lead to a broad inventory of the protein structures found in nature, many of which will be of biomedical interest. Recent advances in experimental and computational technology, together with the wealth of protein sequence information provided by genome sequencing efforts, have made this formidable task possible.

Keywords: structure; X-ray crystallography; protein family; protein fold; homology modelling

Figure 1. Structural genomics makes use of genetic information to obtain a broad inventory of three-dimensional protein structures. This will improve our understanding of basic biological processes and lead to medical advances.
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 References
    ePath Agreed Principles and Procedures, ISGO, Airlie Conference Center, April 2001. See NIGMS webpage at: http://www.nigms.nih.gov/news/meetings/airlie.html.
    Pennisi E (1998) Taking a structure approach to understanding proteins. Science 279: 978–979.
    Structural Genomics (November 2000) Nature Structural Biology (Suppl.), 7S, 927–994.
 Further Reading
    Adams M, Joachimiak A et al. (2004) Meeting review 2003 NIH protein structure initiative workshop in protein production and crystallization for structural and functional genomics. Journal of Structural and Functional Genomics 5(1–2): 1–2.
    Goldsmith-Fischman S and Honig B (2003) Structural genomics: computational methods for structure analysis. Protein Science 12(9): 1813–1821.
    Hou J et al. (2003) A global representation of the protein fold space. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 100(5): 2386–2390.
    Jung JW and Lee W (2004) Structure-based functional discovery of proteins: structural proteomics. Journal of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology 37(1): 28–34.
    Kim SH et al. (2003) Structure-based functional inference in structural genomics. Journal of Structural and Functional Genomics 4(2–3): 129–135.
    Matte A, Sivaraman J et al. (2003) Contribution of structural genomics to understanding the biology of Escherichia coli. Journal of Bacteriology 185(14): 3994–4002.
    ePath The Protein Structure Initiative (PSI) Web site: http://www.nigms.nih.gov/psi/
    Vitkup D et al. (2001) Completeness in structural genomics. Nature Structural Biology 8: 559–566.

Related Sub-Topics:

Protein Structure | Proteomic Studies of Genetic Disease | Techniques and Tools in Molecular Biology | Computational Molecular Biology
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Article Title: Structural Genomics
 
How to Cite close
Norvell, John, Li, Jiayin, Saltsman, Kirstie, and Berg, Jeremy(Jan 2006) Structural Genomics. In: eLS. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester. http://www.els.net [doi: 10.1038/npg.els.0004104]