ABSTRACT
High-resolution structural data play an important role in the process of developing new and efficient drugs, as well as in providing understanding of the structural basis for the function of proteins. Today, more than half of current drug targets are integral membrane proteins (IMPs). Moreover, 20 to 25% of all proteins in a typical cell are IMPs. In contrast, IMPs represent only a very small fraction (< 0.5%) of about 30,000 proteins with known structures present in Public Databases (PDBs).1 Furthermore, the majority of the successfully determined IMPs are of bacterial origin, and only less than 10 unique eukaryotic IMPs have been structurally characterized to date.2
