New Approaches to Functional and Structural Genomics (2005-2010)

The worldwide effort in sequencing the genomes of humans and other organisms has identified a large number of proteins with unknown funtions. Determining the functions of these proteins is one of the next great challenges in biology. This program of research will pursue novel approaches for determining protein function, using three-dimensional structural information of proteins as the basis. In the first approach, the available structural information will be explored to develop bioinformatic tools that will enable functional annotation of proteins computationally. In the second approach, new ways of identifying and structurally characterizing cellular protein complexes will be pursued.