What percentage of the human proteome has known structure?
  1. "Known"? Drug companies solve a large number of structures but most are not deposited in the Protein Data Bank.

  2. ~40,000 genes in the human genome.

  3. ~25,000 entries in the Protein Data Bank:
    1. ~5,600 sequence-distinct entries of good quality.
    2. ~1,100 of these are human.
    3. These entries are mostly single domains or fragments of proteins.
Answer (empirical): ~1%
Answer (homology modeling): ~20% of domains, so ~10% of whole proteins?

Solution: Structural Genomics?

by Eric Martz, University of Massachusetts, July 2003 (revised February 2004)