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Credit: Joseph Blumberg
Professor Gaetano Montelione of Rutgers'
Center for Advanced Biotechnology and
Medicine with one of his nuclear
magnetic resonance machines, a primary
tool employed in the determination of
protein structures
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Scientists at Rutgers will lead a $52.7 million national research program to help determine the structure of protein molecules, how proteins control cellular processes and how to turn that knowledge into designing new medicines.
Under the direction of Gaetano Montelione, of Rutgers’ Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine, the Northeast Structural Genomics Consortium (NESG) will conduct the five-year undertaking. The research program is funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), one of the National Institutes of Health. The program is part of a national effort to find the three-dimensional structures of a wide range of protein molecules, building upon the momentum created by such groundbreaking programs as the Human Genome Project.
For the past five years, Montelione and his consortium partners conducted a $36 million NIGMS pilot program to develop new methods and tools to streamline many of the laborious steps involved in generating protein structures.
The researchers applied the new technologies to determine three-dimensional structures of approximately 200 proteins, representative of some of the 100,000 protein families that are estimated to exist in nature. These structures, in turn, have provided templates for predicting models of more than 40,000 protein structures using methods of structural bioinformatics. Other NIGMS pilot program centers brought the total to about 1,500 structures which can be used to model thousands of other proteins in each of the families they represent.
The focus is now shifting to a phase in which new centers will use methods developed during the pilot period to rapidly determine thousands of protein structures found in organisms ranging from bacteria to humans. These efforts will facilitate structure determination on a much larger number of proteins through computer modeling.
Montelione expects that in the next five years his group should solve about 1,000 more structures, including many human protein structures, using methods of X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. “These structures will have tremendous value in understanding basic biology and in developing the next generation of diagnostics and medicines for treating human diseases,” Montelione said.
NESG is a Rutgers-led collaborative research partnership of more than 15 principal investigators and 120 scientists at nine universities and other research facilities. Approximately $20 million will fund research at Rutgers, the hub of the program. The remaining $30 million will support work at NESG partner institutions.
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