Five years have passed since the National Institutes of Health launched the Protein Structure Initiative (PSI), a 10-year, $600 million effort to accelerate structural genomics. The project's pilot phase emphasized technical development and ended earlier this year; the second (production) phase is now underway. Now, $270 million dollars and 1,200 structures later, it is instructive to reflect and see what we have learned.
The mission of the PSI is to make the three-dimensional, atomic-level structures of most proteins easily available from knowledge of their amino acid sequences. At the moment this is impossible: we simply don't know what many protein folds look like. But by systematically determining the structure of an exemplar of each sequence family, we hope to give researchers the resources to overcome this deficit. An added benefit of this effort is the development of tools to accelerate experimental structure prediction, whether by X-ray crystallography or nuclear magnetic ...
