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Functional insights from structural genomics

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Journal of Structural and Functional Genomics

Abstract

Structural genomics efforts have produced structural information, either directly or by modeling, for thousands of proteins over the past few years. While many of these proteins have known functions, a large percentage of them have not been characterized at the functional level. The structural information has provided valuable functional insights on some of these proteins, through careful structural analyses, serendipity, and structure-guided functional screening. Some of the success stories based on structures solved at the Northeast Structural Genomics Consortium (NESG) are reported here. These include a novel methyl salicylate esterase with important role in plant innate immunity, a novel RNA methyltransferase (H. influenzae yggJ (HI0303)), a novel spermidine/spermine N-acetyltransferase (B. subtilis PaiA), a novel methyltransferase or AdoMet binding protein (A. fulgidus AF_0241), an ATP:cob(I)alamin adenosyltransferase (B. subtilis YvqK), a novel carboxysome pore (E. coli EutN), a proline racemase homolog with a disrupted active site (B. melitensis BME11586), an FMN-dependent enzyme (S. pneumoniae SP_1951), and a 12-stranded β-barrel with a novel fold (V. parahaemolyticus VPA1032).

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Acknowledgements

We thank Randy Abramowitz and John Schwanof at the NSLS for setting up the beamlines; G. DeTitta of Hauptman Woodward Research Institute for crystallization screening. This research was supported by grants from the Protein Structure Initiative of the National Institutes of Health (P50 GM62413 and U54 GM074958).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Sciences, Northeast Structural Genomics Consortium, Columbia University, New York, NY, 10027, USA

    Farhad Forouhar, Alexandre Kuzin, Jayaraman Seetharaman, Insun Lee, Weihong Zhou, Mariam Abashidze, Yang Chen, Wei Yong & Liang Tong

  2. Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine, Northeast Structural Genomics Consortium, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA

    Haleema Janjua, Yingyi Fang, Dongyan Wang, Kellie Cunningham, Rong Xiao, Thomas B. Acton & Gaetano T. Montelione

  3. Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    Eran Pichersky

  4. Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, Tower Road, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA

    Daniel F. Klessig

  5. Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, NY, 14263, USA

    Carl W. Porter

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  1. Farhad Forouhar
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  2. Alexandre Kuzin
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  18. Gaetano T. Montelione
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  19. Liang Tong
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Correspondence to Liang Tong.

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Forouhar, F., Kuzin, A., Seetharaman, J. et al. Functional insights from structural genomics. J Struct Funct Genomics 8, 37–44 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10969-007-9018-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10969-007-9018-3

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