PROTEIN STRUCTURE INITIATIVE ADVANCES TO RAPID PRODUCTION PHASE

Main Menu | News By Date | News By Supplier | News By Category | About Us

PROTEIN STRUCTURE INITIATIVE ADVANCES TO RAPID PRODUCTION PHASE
24 April 2007 - DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory

With the announcement of 10 new research centers, the Protein Structure Initiative launches the second phase of its national effort to find the three-dimensional shapes of a wide range of proteins. This structural information will help reveal the roles that proteins play in health and disease and will help point the way to designing new medicines.

Brookhaven Lab biologists Subramanyam Swaminathan and William Studier are among the principal investigators of the New York Structural GenomiX Research Consortium, which is led by Stephen K. Burley, Chief Scientific Officer of Structural GenomiX, Inc., of San Diego, California, and also includes scientists from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Columbia University, and the University of California at San Francisco.

The new grant builds on an earlier NIH-funded pilot program. In that first phase, members of the New York consortium developed many innovative methods and determined approximately 200 new protein structures. The majority of these structures were deciphered using intense beams of x-rays at the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven Lab, with about 50 of them being determined by Brookhaven scientists.

In the next phase, the Brookhaven group will continue to solve structures and also develop and test new vectors for improved efficiency of high-throughput protein expression. Over the five years of the grant, the New York consortium will receive approximately $48 million, with about $9.5 million of that supporting research at Brookhaven Lab.

Earlier related work at Brookhaven Lab was supported by Office of Biological and Environmental Research with the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and by Laboratory Directed Research and Development funds. The Office of Science was a founder of the Human Genome Project, a nationwide effort to generate the instrumentation and biological and computational resources necessary to sequence the entire human genome, identify all functional genes, and help transfer this information and related technology to the private sector for the benefit of society. Studies of protein expression and structure are a natural outgrowth of this work.

http://www.bnl.gov

About: DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory
Established in 1947 on Long Island, Upton, New York, Brookhaven is a multi-program national laboratory operated by Brookhaven Science Associates for the US Department of Energy (DOE). Six Nobel Prizes have been awarded for discoveries made at the Lab.

Brookhaven has a staff of approximately 3,000 scientists, engineers, technicians and support staff and over 4,000 guest researchers annually.

Brookhaven National Laboratory's role for the DOE is to produce excellent science and advanced technology with the cooperation, support, and appropriate involvement of our scientific and local communities. The fundamental elements of the Laboratory's role in support of the four DOE strategic missions are the following:

To conceive, design, construct, and operate complex, leading edge, user-oriented facilities in response to the needs of the DOE and the international community of users.

To carry out basic and applied research in long-term, high-risk programs at the frontier of science.

To develop advanced technologies that address national needs and to transfer them to other organizations and to the commercial sector.

To disseminate technical knowledge, to educate new generations of scientists and engineers, to maintain technical capabilities in the nation's workforce, and to encourage scientific awareness in the general public.

More News:
  • For April 2007
  • From DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory
  • For Nanotechnology