Developing Technologies for Structural Proteomics Research

Thomas Earnest, Physical Biosciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Berkeley CA 94720

Abstract:

Structural biology is evolving from a field that describes the structures of individual molecules to one where ensembles of molecules and multi-protein systems are studied. Efforts in structural genomics, where efficient coverage of protein structure space is a goal, and in studies of multi-protein complexes, for which pathway-scale information is important, require the development of technologies that increase the throughput and accuracy of structural experiments. The use of synchrotron radiation for x-ray crystallographic data collection on biomolecules made an enormous impact on addressing increasingly challenging and complex questions through structural information, as well as providing genomic-scale atomic-resolution structural data. The automation of the structure determination process, and its integration into upstream and downstream steps, provides for higher throughput and accuracy. Future studies to investigate the structures of multi-protein complexes and their dynamic localization require the continuing development of technologies for the isolation and characterization of these complexes, coupled with multi-technique imaging methods where atomic-to-cellular resolution coverage is achieved.