Abstract
Genomics, the study of the properties of genes and gene products on a whole-organism scale, is revolutionizing all aspects of biology. So powerful has knowledge of the complete nucleotide sequences of the genomes of whole organisms proven to be, that it has spawned a large family of progeny, each shifting the emphasis of their disciplines to discovery- driven (as opposed to hypothesis-driven) research: high-throughput, genome-scale data acquisition. Among the fields that have jumped onto the genomics bandwagon most rapidly is the field of structural biology. The painstaking determination of structures of individual proteins by laboratories that then spent years following-up that work by looking at structures of ligand complexes or mutants is being augmented by assembly-line production of structures for all of the proteins in a pathway or even a whole microbe, as rapidly as possible, with any follow-up work to be left to others. Structural genomics, as this effort is called, has as its stated goals the filling-in of the catalog of known protein folds and the assignment of function to gene products whose functions are not known (these may make up 40% of the gene products in a typical genome), by structural similarity to proteins of known function. How realistic are these expectations? What will be the impact on drug discovery and development? And what other tools are needed to realize the promise inherent in this richness of data?