Protein Structure Initiative

The first phase of the Protein Structure Initiative (PSI-1) lasted from June 2000 until September 2005, and had a budget of $270 million funded primarily by NIGMS with support from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

[2] PSI-1 saw the establishment of nine pilot centers focusing on structural genomics studies of a range of organisms, including Arabidopsis thaliana, Caenorhabditis elegans and Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

[2] The primary goal of PSI-1, to develop methods to streamline the structure determination process, resulted in an array of technical advances.

Several methods developed during PSI-1 enhanced expression of recombinant proteins in systems like Escherichia coli, Pichia pastoris and insect cell lines.

Its goal was to use methods introduced in PSI-1 to determine a large number of proteins and continue development in streamlining the structural genomics pipeline.

[9] Clones are sequence-verified, annotated and stored in the DNASU Plasmid Repository,[10] currently located at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University.

[12] Like the difference in novelty as determined by discovery of new Pfam families, the PSI also discovered more SCOP folds and superfamilies than non-SG efforts.

Among these charges is that the main product of the PSI – PDB files of proteins' atomic coordinates as determined by X-ray crystallography or NMR spectroscopy – are not useful enough to biologists to justify the project's $764 million cost.

These hypothesis-driven proposals are the lifeblood of the scientific enterprise, and as I have discussed recently in other columns, they are being sucked dry by, among other things, an increasing trend to fund large initiatives at their expense.

That $60 million a year would raise the payline at a typical NIH institute by about 6 percentile points, enough to make a huge difference to peer review and to the continuance of a lot of important science.

[19] A short response to this was published:[20] In conclusion, it should be kept in mind that scientific research, and the cutting- edge technologies that both drive and are driven by it, are constantly and rapidly evolving.

But one should not throw the baby out with the bathwater, rather tune the scope and objectives of the PSI to the needs of the life-science community as a whole, much in the spirit of SPINE, the SGC and other European structural genomics/ proteomics projects.