A Plan to Development into a Structural Biology Center from TARA Sakabe Research Project

Abstract

In 1995, we began a cooperative research project for protein crystal structure analysis among industry, public research institutes and universities at the Tsukuba Advanced Research Alliance (TARA) in the University of Tsukuba. This is called the TARA Sakabe Research Project and includes 92 researchers from 13 universities, 4 public institutes and 16 industries as well as 6 foreign researchers. There are 9 research sub-projects in this project. It is my sincere hope that this project will not be limited to X-ray analysis but rather include other tecniques such as NMR, EM, small angle scattering, solution scattering and so on. This would mean that the Sakabe research project could be develop into a structural biology center for a broad range of research related to structure studies. The article written below, describes my personal and tentative plan for the structural biology center.