Description:

The Department of Pharmacology is pleased to welcome Northwestern's own Dr. Wayne F. Anderson, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics.

Structural genomics approaches and methods have greatly sped up structural biology research and are having an impact on structure-guided drug discovery. High throughput methods can rapidly provide detailed information on atomic interactions between small molecules and target proteins. Having access to the structures of sets of proteins that are desired targets in the presence of a variety of ligands as well as proteins that should not be targeted is an advantage for optimizing hits from screens. Another area that benefits from high throughput structure determination is function discovery. By examining whole systems of proteins that function together, structural insights can aid in defining the functions of the system and suggest further experiments. Examples taken from the work of the Center for Structural Genomics of Infectious Diseases will be used to illustrate applications of structural genomics approaches.