History of Progress and Challenges in Structural Biology

Abstract

In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published their work on the molecular structure of DNA double helix after observing the X-ray diffraction results done by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins [1,2]. The simple base pairings, A-T and C-G, revolutionized virtually all biological science fields. Understanding the genome of organisms, especially humans, was believed to be the Holy Grail in understanding organism development and disease. This led to the race to publish the whole human genome. The human genome project was completed in 2003 [3,4]. It took about half a century from the discovery of DNA structure to the completion of the human genome. While we understand more about the DNA structure and the genome of several organisms, such as humans, fruit flies, laboratory mice, rice, etc, the understanding of protein structure is still limited.