The history of biology has been a journey into ever-smaller realms. Biology began with natural history—the study and classification of living organisms. Darwin's theory of natural selection placed this in a coherent framework by showing that the diverse organisms that fill the world arose through a process of evolution.
Figure 1. Structural genomics is a new field, arising at the intersection of structural biology and genomicsùthe painstaking elucidation of protein structures combined with an information-intensive approach to biology. The authors describe this new field, which will attempt to predict the structures of all proteins by determining the structures of a key set of uniquely folded proteins. A few surprises may be in store, however. These two proteins, plastocyanin (left) and azurin (right), have very similar folds, but that would have been difficult to predict based on the information in the genome. At structurally similar places in the proteins, only 11 of the amino acids are identical between the two. In this illustration, each protein chain is represented by a ribbon colored according to the type of amino acids; the underlying information comes from Protein Data Bank entries 3pcy and 1aiz.
This figure was created using the Python Molecular Viewer by Michel F. Sanner.
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