International Summer School
	From Genome to Life:     Structural, Functional and Evolutionary approaches
	VAN TILBEURGH Herman Laboratoire d'enzymologie et de Biologie Structurale, CNRS, Bat 34 1 Avenue de la Terrasse, Gif S Yvette 91 198, France title: structural genomics Large genomic sequencing has changed the scope of biological sciences. A tremendous amount of sequence information is poured down every day into the sequence data bases. Information extraction from these data is of paramount importance and its use is at the centre of competitive struggle between pharmaceutical companies. Structural genomics or structural proteomics as some people prefer to call it, is in principle concerned with the three dimensional structure of all the proteins in the universe. Structural information is very powerful for the comprehension of the working mechanisms of macromolecules at the molecular level. Structural genomics is therefore of main interest for the pharmaceutical industry : the three dimensional structure of biomedical target proteins can be exploited to develop small molecule effectors against diseases. At the fundamental level structural genomics is a cornerstone of functional genomics: the uncovering of the biochemical and cellular function of all expressed orfs in an organism. Structure allows to establish evolutional relationships beyond what can be achieved by sequence comparison alone. The difficulty of obtaining protein structures is orders of magnitudes bigger than for determining protein sequence. Despite this sobering gap, systematic efforts are conducted all over the world towards setting up systematic high throughput structure determination. Many technological developments continue indeed to speed up the structure determination process. In a near future these efforts will provide us with a protein structure dictionary and one will have some structural information on all existing proteins. This information can be used to :  deduce function from unknown proteins make molecular models of related proteins which can then serve biochemical studies predict interactions with small molecule effectors or protein partners. This presentation will develop the concept of structural genomics and will try to answer to the following questions: What is structural genomics precisely about ? Are there more than one way to define it. What are the reasons that it all starts now ? How many structures have to be determined and what can we do with these structures ? Are we better off with protein structures to obtain their function compared to other approaches ? What will we do when every protein structure has been determined ? Will this be the end of experimental structural biology ? ADDITIONAL DATA HTTP LINK: http://genomics.eu.org/