Update: high-throughput structures
3 October 2005
The Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) has placed the structures of more than 100 proteins of medical relevance in the public domain.
The SGC is a not-for-profit company that aims to determine the three-dimensional structures of proteins of medical relevance, and place them in the public domain without restriction. It has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, GlaxoSmithKline and a group of Canadian funding agencies. Earlier this year Swedish funders joined the Consortium, and a Swedish node of the SGC was launched at the Karolinska Institute, linking to the original sites at Oxford and Toronto.
The SGC's strategy is to apply a high-throughput approach to structure determination, concentrating on human proteins likely to be of medical importance and proteins from pathogenic organisms such as the malarial parasite. The structures are freely released, creating a valuable resource for academic research and drug discovery. Earlier this year, the SGC successfully achieved its first year milestone of 50 human and malaria protein structures on budget and two months ahead of schedule.
