The Protein Structure Initiative (PSI) is a federal, university, and industry effort aimed at dramatically reducing the costs and lessening the time it takes to determine a three-dimensional protein structure. The initial goal of the PSI was to make the three-dimensional, atomic-level structures of most proteins easily obtainable from knowledge of their corresponding DNA sequences. During the PSI:Biology phase, highly organized networks of investigators will apply the new paradigm of high-throughput structure determination, which was successfully developed during the earlier phases of the PSI, to study a broad range of important biological and biomedical problems.
Expected benefits from the PSI include: structural descriptions to help researchers discover the functions of proteins, design experiments, and solve other key biomedical problems; faster identification of promising new structure-based medicines; better therapeutics for treating both genetic and infectious diseases; and development of technology and methodology for protein production and crystallography.
The PSI actively engages the scientific community in the selection of proteins for structure determination and is increasing its outreach, accessibility, and impact on biomedical research via the PSI-Nature Structural Genomics Knowledgebase, a continually updated portal to PSI data, resources, and latest developments. Biological material resources generated by the PSI are shared with the scientific community through the PSI-Material Repository and through collaborations with PSI investigators.
