Structural genomics in the post-genomics era - the shapes of things to come

The overwhelming success of the current genomic sequencing efforts has spawned analogous efforts in the structural biology community. These new research efforts, termed 'structural genomics', seek to create and execute high-throughput structure determination that would allow scientists to obtain hundreds to thousands of relevant macromolecular structures in a fraction of the time required today. Groups in academia, national laboratories and industry are launching such efforts, each examining a different set of model organisms and each with a different research model. This review will present the current structural genomics efforts and the data that have been derived from these efforts to date. The utility of these projects to pharmaceutical drug discovery efforts will also be presented.