Crowdsourcing Science with TOPSAN

New advances in technology are allowing scientists to sequence genomes and determine the structures of the proteins they encode at a faster rate and lower cost than ever before. The  centers, such as the (JCSG), have been instrumental in establishing the structures of hundreds of proteins each year. While this flood of new data is a boon to science, the time and resources needed to analyze it all has become a major bottleneck.
“We have become victims of our own success,” explains  director of the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology program at Sanford-Burnham. “New protein structures are being determined all the time. And while it’s important to know what a protein looks like, we need to better leverage that information to improve our understanding of how a protein works and what biological functions it performs in a cell.” Moreover, knowledge of a protein’s structure and function is necessary for identifying its role in human health and disease, as well as unveiling its potential as a therapeutic target.
Several years ago, Dr. Godzik and his research team came up with an idea to protein structure annotation. In 2006, along with their JCSG colleagues, they launched (TOPSAN), a central portal for scientists to collect, share and distribute information about three-dimensional protein structures. TOPSAN embodies the idea that many can succeed where the individual cannot. No matter how much any one person knows about a particular protein, there are others in the scientific community who know more about other aspects of the same protein. Thus, the collective analyses from multiple experts around the world are far more informative than the localized information that any one individual – or even single research group – could contribute.