When tackling such ambitious projects, scientists rarely work solo either: they get much more done when they interact. This is the raison d'être behind 3D Repertoire, an integrated project funded by the European Commission as part of the 6th Framework Programme, and coordinated by Luis Serrano. The goal of the project is to allow scientists with diverse and complimentary expertise to join forces and come up with a detailed look at the structures of all protein complexes in yeast.

"In the past, major obstacles to creating useful models of cellular function have been that you need a wide range of expertise to cover all aspects of protein-complex structure and modelling", says Luis, "as well as an infrastructure to bring that expertise and the data together." Our hope at the end of 4 years will be to provide the basis to go for something a little bit more challenging: Getting the structure of a cell at atomic resolution.

The EU funding of 3D Repertoire gives Europe its first large-scale project analysing multiple protein complex structures, helping to keep European research at the forefront of international science.

Partners in 3D Repertoire include most of EMBL's Structural and Computational Biology Unit, plus groups from EMBL-Hamburg. They'll team up with researchers from ten internationally renowned institutes and universities, in seven different countries. The project also includes significant input from private enterprise, with the inclusion of four industrial partners. The 3D Repertoire kickoff meeting, held at EMBL-Heidelberg on March 30-31, highlighted that the project will not only produce a pipeline of structural information, but also will provide training and job opportunities for young researchers in an exciting multidisciplinary environment.

The hope for 3D Repertoire is that by bringing together the right mix of expertise and increasing interaction, things will be a lot less complex. Now we can sit back and watch the exciting stuff happen.