Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: Structural Bioinformatics Laboratory


Project overview

The Northeast Structural Genomics (NESG) consortium is one of the four large scale NIH funded structural genomics centers of the Protein Structure Initiative (PSI:Biology)

The NESG employs both X-Ray Crystallography and NMR Spectroscopy to determine the three-dimensional structures of novel proteins. NESG protein structures provide novel structural information useful in modeling thousands protein domains.

Targeted proteins are typically representatives from large protein domain families, biomedical themes, and targets nominated by the biomedical community. The NESG focuses on eukaryotic proteins, particularly Human proteins involved in cancer biology, protein-protein interaction networks, specific biochemical pathways, and proteins implicated in other Human diseases.

Structures determined by the NESG and other structural genomic groups are an essential component of biological research, often providing tests of specific biological hypotheses. Structural genomics is not driven by specific hypotheses but rather often provides critical clues to biochemical function and evolutionary processes and thus is often a "hypothesis generating" activity.

The technologies, structures, and reagents developed by the NESG and the PSI provide the basis for new hypothesis-driven research project.