November 6, 2000

BIRMINGHAM, AL — The Center for Biophysical Science and Engineering at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) has been awarded a five-year $9.92 million grant under the Structural Genomics Initiative from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) to conduct protein structure research.

The UAB center, under the direction of Larry DeLucas, Ph.D., will receive nearly $2 million in the first year through a subcontract with the Southeast Collaboratory for Structural Genomics at the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens. Funds will be used to support UAB’s ongoing efforts to map the three-dimensional structures of proteins, essential elements of life functions. “Determination of a protein’s structure helps scientists to better understand and control their function,” says DeLucas. The development of new disease-fighting drugs is one potential use of protein structures.

UAB is one of several institutes funded by NIGMS to take part in a major initiative over the next few years to map the structures of thousands of proteins. UAB and other research centers will organize all known protein structures into families then map the structures of one or more proteins from each family, resulting in about 10,000 protein structures over the course of the project.

“This project can be viewed as an inventory of all the protein structure families that exist in nature,” says Dr. Marvin Cassman, NIGMS director. The library of protein structures will serve as a national resource for scientists to use in predicting the approximate structures of all other proteins.

UAB is one of the core institutes funded under the Southeast Collaboratory for Structural Genomics, directed by Bi-Cheng Wang, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at UGA. The total amount of funding being contributed to the Southeast Collaboratory for Structural Genomics is $23.5 million over five years. The NIGMS is contributing 91.5 percent of the amount ($21.5 million) and UGA is contributing 8.5 percent ($2 million) from other non-federal sources.

The Collaboratory will analyze part of the human genome and the entire genomes of two representative organisms — the roundworm “Caenorhabditis elegans” and its microbial ancestor,” Pyrococcus furiosus.” Also, the UAB center and others will work to improve techniques used in mapping proteins, such as X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and the time consuming and labor intensive processes involved.

Other lead researchers for the project at UAB are Ming Luo, Ph.D., professor of microbiology, and Bingdong Sha, Ph.D., assistant professor of cell biology.