Completeness in structural genomics

Structural genomics has the goal of obtaining useful, three-dimensional mod els of all proteins by a combination of experimental structure determinatio n and comparative model building. We evaluate different strategies for opti mizing information return on effort. The strategy that maximizes structural coverage requires about seven times fewer structure determinations compare d with the strategy in which targets are selected at random, With a choice of reasonable model quality and the goal of 90% coverage, we extrapolate th e estimate of the total effort of structural genomics. It would take simila r to 16,000 carefully selected structure determinations to construct useful atomic models for the vast majority of all proteins. In practice, unless t here is global coordination of target selection, the total effort will like ly increase by a factor of three. The task can be accomplished within a dec ade provided that selection of targets is highly coordinated and significan t funding is available.