Industrializing Structural Biology

X-ray crystallography is the method of choice for determining molecular structure. The accumulation of molecular structure information has allowed a more complete representation of three-dimensional protein folds, enabling more successful homology modeling of unknown structures. Breakthroughs in genome sequencing projects have underscored the need for concomitant advances in structural biology if we hope to determine the extent of protein folding-space and elucidate how an assembly of proteins constitutes a cellular organism. This essay outlines an industrial approach to high-throughput (HT) determination of molecular structures.