Public disclosure of what these things do when they fit together in different ways helps in trying to design new drugs or laundry detergent enzymes. Building a public database of protein structural components to help predict function is an important goal, said Andrzej Joachimiak, director of the Structural Biology Center at Argonne. We need more information to improve those tools. In fact, Joachimiak and his colleagues have worked to build databases so that knowing the sequence of genes that produce a given protein will be enough to predict the protein's structure and function. But this is more a research goal than a reality.
Much work focuses on improving the accuracy and speed with which scientists can map proteins.
With each month that researchers use Argonne's X-ray beam to analyze more protein structures, they improve their databases and their skills, he said. To sample what the technology can do when revved up, researchers analyzed four new proteins during a three-day workshop held at Argonne a few years ago. As they catalog more protein structures, scientists can look for patterns in protein families that provide drug design clues. Joachimiak's work includes looking for patterns in certain sugars found in the cell walls of pathogenic bacteria that aren't found in other species such as humans. Scientists aspire to use that information to design a drug that would interfere with the normal activities of that protein and kill the infectious bug while having no effect on the person being treated.