Synergistic Activities since 1995 – some examples

1. The University of Georgia X-ray diffraction facility: Since joining the University in 1995, a state-of-the-art X-ray diffraction facility for structural biology has been built and an outstanding research team assembled. The GRA funded UGA X-ray diffraction facility provides UGA researchers and students access to one of the nations most modern X-ray diffraction laboratories housed at a university. The facility was central to hosting the American Crystallographic Association Summer School (1995-2000) and UGA’s selection (2000) as one of the first NIH structural genomics pilot centers.
   
   
2. SER-CAT: The Southeast Regional Collaborative Access Team (http://www.ser-cat.org/index.html), organized and now headed by B.C. Wang and administered by UGA, is a consortium of 25 institutions including the NIH intramural research institutes, NASA and industry. SER-CAT has constructed and is operating two X-ray beamlines (Sector 22) at the Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory outside of Chicago. The SER-CAT project was first conceived at UGA in 1997 and construction started in 1999. Since being dedicated in October 2002, SER-CAT’s ID Beamline has now hosted more than 400 investigators collecting over 5,000 data sets and has contributed to 155 publications, 197 PDB entries as of 9/27/05. The General User’s Program for the ID beamline started in January 2005. SER-CAT has been recently featured in the World Business Review with Alexander Haig. SER-CAT serves a national community of structural biologists.
   
   
3. SECSG: The Southeast Collaboratory for Structural Genomics headed by B.C. Wang was one of the first seven NIH pilot centers for structural genomics. During the past five years with funding from NIH, GRA and the University, an outstanding facility for cost-effective, high-throughput protein production and structure determination has been established. SECSG has reduced the time and expense associated with protein production and structure determination by X-ray crystallography. Using SER-CAT synchrotron X-rays, and cluster based computational pipelines, SECSG crystallographers were able to solve five structures during one day at the synchrotron, a record at the Advanced Photon Source.
   
   
4. GoSPI: The Global Initiative for Structural Proteomics was found in 2005 with B.C. Wang as the US coordinator after the First Annual UK-Southeast Symposium on Structural Genomics and Proteomics of Membrane and Metalloproteins held at the University of Georgia on October 14-16, 2005 (http://www.bmb.uga.edu/uk-seusa). The mission of GoSPI is to encourage an international collaboration of world experts in structural and molecular biology, genomics, metal centre assembly, membrane proteins and computational biology working to answer key questions for the understanding of the structure-functional aspects of molecular machines in living cells relevant to environment, energy and health. A follow-up planning meeting for GoSPI was organized by B.C. Wang and held at the University of Georgia on February 2, 2006. B.C. Wang is also involved in organizing the Second Annual UK-Southeast Symposium on Structural Genomics and Proteomics of Membrane and Metalloproteins to be held on August at the University of St. Andrew, Scotland.