Structural Genomics Consortium research centre established at Karolinska Institutet

23-Sep-2005

The Structural genomics Consortium, Karolinska Institutet, Vinnova, Knut and Alice Wallenberg's foundation (KAW) and The Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) announced the establishment of a Swedish research node of the Structural Genomics Consortium.

A Swedish laboratory based at the Karolinska Institutet has been established by the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) in its ambitious efforts to unravel the structures of hundreds of proteins of biomedical importance. The laboratory aims to increase the number of structures produced by the SGC to over 400 in the next two years by contributing at least 50 new protein structures to the project.

Established as a charity, the Structural Genomics Consortium's current mandate is to determine the three dimensional structures of proteins of medical relevance, and place them in the public domain without restriction. The target priority list is chosen based on the interest from the research communities, expertise within the Consortium and scientific impact.

The SGC utilises the vast resource of the Human Genome Project (HGP), which has given medical researchers and scientists the nucleotide sequence of the approximately 30.000 genes in the human body. Genes usually exert their function through the proteins they encode. The SGC has taken on the task of exploring the structure and function of proteins, providing information about their role in health and disease. Since July 1 2004, the SGC has been operating out of the Universities of Oxford and Toronto. During the first year of operation the SGC determined 78 novel structures of proteins with significant biological and disease impact.

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