Dear crystallography colleagues,

I very much hope that you have or will send in your comments on the 
NIH Protein Structure Initiative. You can send in comments until this 
Friday. I've listed below a few accomplishments of the PSI you may 
want to mention.  I've also added a brief analysis showing that PSI 
funding helps out all of U.S. structural biology in a major way, and 
that if the PSI were to end, getting a structural biology NIH grant 
will be even harder than it is now.

To participate in the survey: send an email 
to  [log in to unmask] You will receive a message in response 
listing questions to respond to.  Just reply to that email without 
changing the subject line.

I hope that you will email the NIH today and respond to their survey!

I apologize if you have received this more than once due the mailing 
lists I have used.

All the best,
Tom T


         Accomplishments of the PSI (a partial list)

         What the PSI supports:

Four Large-Scale Production Research Centers and six Specialized 
Research Centers
Two Homology Modeling Centers
KnowledgeBase and Materials Repository with two Resource Centers
40 individual-investigator and program project grants.

         Determination of 2100 new structures:

Responsible for 47% of all unique structures deposited in the PDB in 2007
Creation of structure pipeline capable of consistently determining 
550 structures per year
Reduction in cost of structure determination to $75,000 per structure 
including overhead.
Determination of important drug targets including essential enzymes, 
kinases, phosphatases, proteases, DNA- and RNA-binding proteins, and 
molecular chaperones
TB SGC (begun by the PSI) responsible for determination of 2/3 of 
structures in PDB from M. tuberculosis; 9 structures in active use in 
drug discovery

         Support for development of widely-used technologies:

Nanoliter crystallization and robotic imaging methods
Beamline crystal automounting technologies
RESOLVE model-building
Improved ARP/wARP model-building
Phaser molecular replacement software
HKL3000 and PHENIX packages for automated structure determination
Expression vectors that allow rapid generation multiple constructs 
for challenging proteins,
Optimized media for protein expression in bacteria
Improved cell-free protein expression methods
Engineering surface residues on proteins to improve crystallization
Automated systems for multi-step protein purification.

         Service to the community

Training of hundreds of students, postdocs and staff
Methods, expression clones and results to be made available to the 
community through the KnowledgeBase and Materials Repository
.


         How the PSI helps structural biology funding

Contrary to the general perception, the PSI helps general structural 
biology funding at the NIH -- and in a major way. The PSI is funded 
from a different source of money at NIGMS than general structural 
biology grants. It funds a large number of researchers who would 
otherwise be competing for general structural biology funding (40 R01 
and P01 grants plus all the investigators involved in the PSI 
Centers.). In effect the PSI is a huge source of supplemental funding 
for structural biology (1/3 of total structural biology funding at NIGMS).

What would happen if the PSI ended?  PSI funding ($66M/year) is about 
3.5% of the NIGMS budget. Ending the PSI would (at best) increase 
funding for all other NIGMS programs by 3.5%.  General structural 
biology funding is about $130M/year; this might increase by $4.5M if 
the PSI ended, allowing the funding of about 10 new R01 structural 
biology grants over a 5-year period. Compare this to the 40 
additional PSI R01/P01 investigators and approximately 80 PSI Center 
investigators who would suddenly be competing for general structural 
biology funding. Ending the PSI would be a serious blow to the 
chances of individual investigators getting conventional structural 
biology R01 grants.




For  accomplishments of PSI-1 (pilot phase, now completed) see: 
http://www.nigms.nih.gov/Initiatives/PSI/Background/PilotFacts.htm
For an update on the PSI as of July, 2007, 
see:  http://www.nigms.nih.gov/News/Reports/psi2_update_052007.htm
For more  information on the assessment  process 
see:  http://www.nigms.nih.gov/About/Council/PSIAssessment/ .








Thomas C. Terwilliger
Mail Stop M888
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos, NM 87545

Tel:  505-667-0072                 email: [log in to unmask]
Fax: 505-665-3024                 SOLVE web site: http://solve.lanl.gov
PHENIX web site: http:www.phenix-online.org
ISFI Integrated Center for Structure and Function Innovation web 
site: http://techcenter.mbi.ucla.edu
TB Structural Genomics Consortium web site: http://www.doe-mbi.ucla.edu/TB