eResearch Solutions for High Throughput Structural Biology

Structural biology research places significant demands upon computing and informatics infrastructure. Protein production, crystallization and X-ray data collection require solutions to data management, annotation, target tracking and remote experiment monitoring. Structure elucidation is computationally demanding and requires user-friendly interfaces to high-performance computing resources. Here we discuss how these challenges are being met at the Protein Crystallography Unit at Monash University. Specifically, we have developed informatics solutions for each stage in the structural biology pipeline, from DNA cloning through to protein structure determination. This infrastructure will be pivotal for accelerating the process of structural discovery and will be of significant interest to other laboratories worldwide.