PSI to Determine Shapes of 3,000-4,000 Proteins in $300M Second Phase of Project

NEW YORK, July 1 (GenomeWeb News) - The Protein Structure Initiative has launched the second phase of its national effort to find the three-dimensional shapes of a wide range of proteins. During this phase, 10 new research centers will receive about $300 million over five years to determine the shape of 3,000 to 4,000 proteins.

During the  first phase of the funded PSI project, which began in 2000, PSI centers determined the structures of more than1,100 proteins. With the second phase, the focus of the project is shifting from developing tools to streamline steps for generating protein structures to using those tools to rapidly determine thousands of protein structures in organisms ranging from bacteria to humans.

"The PSI has transformed protein structure determination into a highly automated process, making it possible to go from a selected target to a completed structure much more rapidly thanbefore," said Jeremy Berg, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, which funds the PSI. "Building on these achievements, the new centers will take PSI to the next level, yielding large numbers of structures and tackling significant new challenges."

The 10 new PSI research centers include four large-scale centers:

• the JointCenterfor Structural Genomics, led by Ian Wilson of the Scripps Research Institute;
• the MidwestCenterfor Structural Genomics, led by Adrzej Joachimiak of the Argonne National Laboratory;
• the New York Structural GenomiX Research Consortium, led by Stephen Burley of Structural GenomiX; and
• the Northeast Structural Genomics Consortium, led by Gaetano Montelione of RutgersUniversity,

and six specialized centers:

• the AcceleratedTechnologiesCenterfor Gene to 3D Structure, led by Lance Stewart of deCODE biostructures;
• the Center for Eukaryotic Structural Genomics, led by John Markley of the Universityof Wisconsin-Madison;
• the Center for High-Throughput Structural Biology, led by George De Titta of the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute;
• the Center for Structures of Membrane Proteins, led by Robert Stroud of the Universityof California San Francisco;
• the IntegratedCenterfor Structure and Function Innovation, led by Thomas Terwilliger of Los Alamos National Laboratory; and 
• the New York Consortium on Membrane Protein Structure, led by Wayne Hendrickson of the New YorkStructuralBiologyCenter.