Protein is the substance responsible for the foundation of life. Three dimensional crystal structures of proteins are expected to provide great benefits in many scientific fields. One effective method of conducting this type of research, which has been receiving a great amount of attention, is X-ray crystal analysis using synchrotron radiation.
In 1995, we began a cooperative research project for protein crystal structure analysis among industry, public research institutes and universities at the Tsukuba Advanced Research Alliance (TARA) in the University of Tsukuba. This location has an advantage over other instltutions in that it is very close to the Photon Factory (PF) at the National Laboratory for High Energy Physics (KEK), currently major source of synchrotron X-ray radiation in Japan. This is called the TARA Sakabe Research Project and includes 92 researchers from 13 universities, 4 public institutes and 16 industries as well as 6 foreign researchers. There are 9 research sub-projects in this project. The first sub-project is called Instrunrentation, and has already worked intensively to construct a station at BL6B in PF where a new Weisenberg camera and two large imaging plate (400x800mm2) readers are going to be installed. This wlll provide a comprehensive data collection system for macromolecule crystallography and has been funded by pharmaceutical companies. Up to half of the beamtime on this station must be available to normal PF users, however, the remaining beamtime can be used by project members.
Research based on three dimensional structures will be conducted in conjunction with researchers in many other scholatic fields including crystallography, biochemistry, biophysics, nrolecular biology, chemistry, physics, pharmacy, medical science, agriculture, and industrial technology. It is my sincere hope that this project will not be limited to X-ray analysis but rather include other tecniques such as NMR. EM, small angle scattering, solution scattering and so on. This would mean that the Sakabe research project could be develop into a structural biology center for a broad range of research related to structure studies.
The article written below, describes my personal and tentative plan for the structural biology center.