Protein structure initiative – Biologists wanted. | Macromolecular Modeling Blog ™

Feb
18
2009

Protein structure initiative – Biologists wanted.

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), has announced a new direction for the Protein Structure Initiative, – PSI:Biology. The program will support research partnerships between groups of biologists and high-throughput structure determination centers to solve problems of biomedical importance.

PSI:Biology will include eight components. Beginning in April 2009, NIGMS plans to release requests for applications for the following five components, which will be awarded beginning in July 2010 with an estimated fiscal year 2010 total budget of $37 million or more.

High-throughput structure determination centers that will devote most of their efforts to solving community-nominated sets of protein structures.
Consortia of scientists that will work with the structure determination centers to solve biological problems that require the solution of many protein structures.
Centers focused on determining membrane protein structures of great biological interest.
The PSI-SG Knowledgebase.
The PSI-SG Materials Repository.

To continue the PSI emphasis on method and technology development NIGMS also plans to issue program announcements awards to support:

Technology development for structure determination,
New methods for protein modeling, and
Additional partnerships with members of the broader community.

To date, PSI-supported researchers have generated more than 3,500 structures, many revealing novel patterns of folding, reported in more than 1,200 research papers.

The PSI has received notable criticism (e.g. “An idea whose time has gone”) from the structural biology community at its starting days, with the main complaint being that this mass of structural data isn’t useful to biologists. Will this new initiative help them calm down ?

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