About JCSG

Historical note. JCSG operated from 2000 to 2015 as part of the NIH Protein Structure Initiative (PSI), which concluded in 2015. The description below reflects the consortium as it ran during that period. The structures JCSG determined remain a permanent public resource in the Protein Data Bank under CC0 licensing.

The Joint Center for Structural Genomics (JCSG) was a multi-institutional PSI:Biology Center for High-Throughput Structure Determination, funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) as part of the third phase of the NIH Protein Structure Initiative (U54 GM094586).

Overview

The JCSG high-throughput (HTP) platform, assembled over more than 15 years, has delivered a large number of protein structures to the community by both X-ray crystallography and NMR on a wide range of targets — from bacteria to human — including challenging targets such as eukaryotic proteins, protein–protein, and other macromolecular complexes. Our primary approach to HTP structural biology involves processing sets of targets through an extensive combination of bioinformatics and biophysical analyses to efficiently characterize each target and optimize its path through our pipeline.

JCSG is a multi-institutional consortium with major activities at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI); the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF); the University of California, San Diego (UCSD); the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (SBMRI); and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Vision

To explore the expanding protein universe to find new challenges and opportunities to significantly contribute to new biology, chemistry, and medicine through development of high-throughput approaches to structural genomics.

Mission

Our primary mission as a PSI:Biology Center for High-Throughput Structure Determination is to provide a robust, flexible HTP structure determination pipeline that meets the challenges and embraces the opportunities arising from PSI:Biology Partnerships projects and PSI Community Nominated Targets (CNTs). JCSG leverages its HTP platform to promote the biological and biomedical impact of all of its structures through extensive functional and bioinformatics analyses, both internally and in collaboration with our Partnerships, CNTs, and the broader PSI:Biology network. As part of that network, we strive to promote widespread use of PSI resources, materials, methodologies, and data. JCSG also continues to develop new experimental and computational technologies to address a wide spectrum of targets while keeping cost per structure to a minimum and quality to the highest standard.

Center Organization

JCSG centralizes each core activity into single dedicated sites, each handling distinct but interconnected objectives. This unique approach allows each specialized group to focus on its own area of expertise and provides well-defined interfaces among the groups. It also addresses the scalability needed to process large numbers of targets at greatly reduced cost per target.

JCSG production groups

• Administrative Core (AC)
• Bioinformatics Core (BIC)
• Crystallomics Core (CC)
• Structure Determination Core (SDC)
• NMR Core (NMR)

JCSG is committed to a model that employs distributed local management and centralized coordination to establish a pipeline with fully functional large-scale production sites that are tightly integrated to ensure standardization of data, uniformity of communication interfaces, and synchronization of production schedules. This "factory"-like approach was developed in a scalable mode so that JCSG can adapt to changing goals and challenges, including a learning environment that feeds results back from prior experiments to increase productivity at every step.

Meet the JCSG team →Explore the JCSG pipeline →