The Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) is a not-for-profit organization formed in 2004 to determine the three dimensional structures of proteins of medical relevance, and place them in the Protein Data Bank without restriction. The SGC operates out of the Universities of Oxford and Toronto and Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm and is supported by funding from the Wellcome Trust, GSK, Novartis, Merck, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research and the Canadian, Ontario and Swedish governments. Since its inception, the SGC has deposited the structures of over 800 proteins from its Target List of ~2,000 proteins. The Target List comprises proteins that have relevance to human health and disease, such as proteins associated with diabetes, cancer, and infectious diseases such as malaria.

The SGC is focusing its scientific efforts around human protein families, including dehydrogenases, kinases, 14-3-3 proteins, ATPases, RNA helicases, protein tyrosine phosphatases, sulfotransferases, poly-(adp-ribose)-polymerases and more recently histone demethylases and methyltransferases. The SGC is also spearheading an "open access" chemistry partnership - a new model for pre-competitive drug discovery in which the public and private sectors collaborate to generate potent and selective pharmacological inhibitors of human proteins, and commit to make these reagents available without restriction on use.

The SGC is headed by Aled Edwards (CEO/Director). Operations at each site are managed by a Chief Scientist - Cheryl Arrowsmith in Toronto, Canada; Chas Bountra in Oxford, UK and Johan Weigelt (Associate Director) in Stockholm, Sweden.

[edit] Highlight publications (2008-2009)

Barr AJ, Ugochukwu E, Lee WH, King ON, Filippakopoulos P, Alfano I, Savitsky P, Burgess-Brown NA, Müller S, Knapp S. Large-scale structural analysis of the classical human protein tyrosine phosphatome, Cell 136(2):352-63 (2009)

Avvakumov GV, Walker JR, Xue S, Li Y, Duan S, Bronner C, Arrowsmith CH, Dhe-Paganon S. Structural basis for recognition of hemi-methylated DNA by the SRA domain of human UHRF1, Nature 455(7214):822-5 (2008)

Filippakopoulos P, Kofler M, Hantschel O, Gish GD, Grebien F, Salah E, Neudecker P, Kay LE, Turk BE, Superti-Furga G, Pawson T, Knapp S. Structural coupling of SH2-kinase domains links Fes and Abl substrate recognition and kinase activation, Cell 134(5):793-803 (2008)

Gräslund S, et al., Protein production and purification, Nature Methods 5(2):135-46 (2008)

For a complete listing click here.

[edit] External links

• Global SGC website
• SGC website hosted by University of Toronto
• SGC website hosted by University of Oxford
• SGC Website hosted by Karolinska Institutet

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