New dimensions of structural proteomics: exploring chemical and biological space.

The automation of all steps in protein crystallography—expression, purification, crystallization, X-ray data collection, and analysis—has provided the community with many new opportunities. The most obvious, now known as structural genomics or structural proteomics, is to define the three-dimensional structures of representative proteins of each family found in living organisms. This was a bold and imaginative step forward, which has allowed us to map complex biological space, in this case protein space.