Rational drug design
Pharmaceutical companies are making increasing use of macromolecular crystallography. Improvements in the speed of data collection and structure solution mean that it is now possible to obtain structural information on a timescale that allows chemists and structural biologists to work together in the development of lead compounds into drug candidates.

Genomic Studies
The recent interpretation of the sequence of the human genome, together with genome sequences for an increasing number of less complex organisms, has profound implications for structural biology.

Immune system studies
Proteins involved in inflammatory and immune responses, including superantigens, auto-antibodies (responsible for rheumatoid arthritis), and immunoglobulin E and its receptor (which play a key role in all allergic diseases) are important biological and medical targets for X-ray crystallographic analysis.

Membrane proteins
Progress in the structure determination of this class of proteins has been quite slow, and a relatively small number of groups are active in this area. However, membrane proteins are estimated to represent up to 30% of the gene products of a typical genome, and are of considerable interest to the pharmaceutical industry (almost 50% of drug compounds in clinical use are targeted at membrane proteins). Consequently, structural studies of membrane proteins will become increasingly important in the next decade.