Structural genomics seeks to rapidly expand the number of protein structures to permit extraction of the maximum amount of information from the genomic sequence databases. The advent of several large-scale pilot projects, funded by NIH/NIGMS, leads to many new challenges in the field of macromolecular structure determination. One of the primary goals of the CCI is the development of a novel software package called PHENIX (Python-based Hierarchical Environment for Integrated Xtallography). This software is being developed as part of an international collaboration, funded by the National Institute for General Medical Sciences at NIH and headed by the CCI group. Our collaborators are:
The Berkeley Structural Genomics Center
The availability of the PHENIX program in the future will be important for Structural Genomics projects, which require automated structure solution to analyze large volumes of data. The CCI is therefore also part of the Berkeley Structural Genomics Center (BSGC), one of the nine pilot Structural Genomics Centers established by the NIH in 2000 and 2001. The BSGC is pursuing an integrated structural genomics program designed to obtain a near-complete structure of two minimal genomes, Mycoplasma genitalium and Mycoplasma pneumoniae, two related human pathogens, notable for their feasibility and relevance to human disease. Our role in the BSGC is to provide the computational tools to rapidly solve structures once the experimental data have been collected.