Structural study in the platform for drug discovery, informatics, and structural life science

Abstract

The Platform for Drug Discovery, Informatics, and Structural Life Science (PDIS), which has been launched since FY2012, is a national project in the field of structural biology. The PDIS consists of three cores-structural analysis, control, and informatics-and aims to support life science researchers who are not familiar with structural biology. The PDIS project is able to provide full-scale support for structural biology research. The support provided by the PDIS project includes protein purification with various expression systems, large scale protein crystallization, crystal structure determination, small angle scattering (SAXS), NMR, electron microscopy, bioinformatics, etc. In order to utilize these methods of support, PDIS users need to submit an application form to the one-stop service office. Submitted applications will be reviewed by three referees. It is strongly encouraged that PDIS users have sufficient discussion with researchers in the PDIS project before submitting the application. This discussion is very useful in the process of project design, particularly for beginners in structural biology. In addition to this user support, the PDIS project has conducted R&D, which includes the development of synchrotron beamlines. In the PDIS project, PF and SPring-8 have developed beamlines for micro-crystallography, high-throughput data collection, supramolecular assembly, and native single anomalous dispersion (SAD) phasing. The newly developed beamlines have been open to all users, and have accelerated structural biology research. Beamlines for SAXS have also been developed, which has dramatically increased bio-SAXS users.