research advances

Synopses of important developments in the field of structural biology and structural genomics, including advances from the Protein Structure Initiative. The featured articles and technical highlights are specially written for the Structural Biology Knowledgebase, while the research highlights are taken from NPG publications.

April 2010

featured articles
- The cancer kinome
  
  Structural genomics has an important role to play in guiding development of specific anti-cancer drugs.
- Bacterial spore kinase
  
  A genomic, phylogenetic and structural study hints that these kinases have functional roles that might be druggable.
research highlights
- Sumoylation: No half measures
  Structures of the SUMO E1 active site show it is remodelled for thioester bond formation.
- Big surprises in a little package
  An in-depth, systems biology approach to analyzing a 'reduced genome' bacterium reveals startling complexity.
technical highlights
- Removing the NMR bottleneck
  Protein backbone information in combination with the structure-prediction method Rosetta are sufficient for accurate structures up to 25 kDa.
- Assigning protein function: GeMMA
  A new approach to automated functional subfamily classification works on huge superfamilies and is well suited to structural genomics.