This proposal is to request support for a Keystone Symposia meeting entitled """"""""Structural Genomics: Expanding the Horizons of Structural Biology"""""""", organized by Ian A. Wilson, Kurt W|thrich, Soichi Wakatsuki and Christine A. Orengo, which will be held in Breckenridge, Colorado from January 8 - 13, 2010. Structural Biology continues to be one of the most prolific and informative ways to make biological and biomedical discoveries at the turn of the millennium, and provides fundamental molecular level insights into the underlying biological and biochemical functions. Structural genomics has been at the forefront of these developments as a major contributor to the advances of high throughput (HT) technologies and methodologies that span the gene to structure process by both crystallography and NMR. In parallel, the rapid expansion of the genome sequencing projects is substantially increasing the complexity and size of the known protein universe, and providing structural biologists with a wealth of new opportunities and challenges to explore, the diversity of biological macromolecules and their relationships to, function, evolution and disease. The goal of this Keystone Symposia meeting is to explore how we can best harness the current approaches from high throughput structural genomics to tackle present and future challenges in structural biology and how we can directly apply these methods to topical and important problems in structural, molecular, cellular and chemical biology. We will focus on approaches that are applicable not only for large consortia, but also for single investigator laboratories and smaller scale projects. Using such methodologies and technologies, we can then keep pace with the genome sequencing efforts and continue to make significant contributions to the constantly increasing discoveries on the intricacies and vagaries of complex biological processes - such as mammalian proteomes, microbial pathogens and cellular and signaling networks /systems. In this way, structural biology will continue to lead the way in making innovative discoveries in biological, chemical, and biomedical research. Opportunities for interdisciplinary interactions will be further enhanced by the concurrent meeting """"""""Structural Biology"""""""", which will share the opening keynote session and two plenary sessions with this meeting.
The field of structural genomics encompasses cutting-edge experimental methods to determine the three- dimensional structure and function of proteins and other macromolecules. These technologies enable the scientific community to keep pace with the wealth of information derived from genome sequencing efforts. The goal of this Keystone Symposia meeting is to explore how the current approaches and developments from high-throughput structural genomics can best be harnessed to tackle present and future challenges in structural biology and how we can apply these methods to problems in structural, molecular, cellular, chemical and biomedical biology.
