Canada drives medical protein-structure hunt
From Nature Magazine (Nature 422, 462 (03 April 2003)) Click
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[TORONTO] The three-dimensional structures of more than 350 human proteins
are to be deciphered over the next three years by an Anglo-Canadian
partnership.
Four leading Canadian funding agencies, together with British biomedical
charity the Wellcome Trust and pharmaceutical company
GlaxoSmithKline, will make the first results of the £40-million (US$63-million) programme freely
available at the end of this year. The work of the Structural Genomics
Consortium will be carried out in laboratories at the universities of Oxford
and Toronto. They will focus on proteins of medical relevance, such as those
that are associated with cancer, neurological disorders and malaria. Aled
Edwards, a proteomics researcher at the University of Toronto and director
of the consortium, says that the results will enable scientists "to put the
genome to practical use".
The initiative marks the first time that the four Canadian funding agencies,
which include Genome Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research,
have worked together.
