Macromolecular Modeling Blog ™

These are days of a world wide economic turmoil, most of the industry is effected and the academia as well. But even within the academia, certain fields are funded better than others. What happened to the molecular modeling funding?

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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.

• 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 ?