Hundreds of genomes have been successfully sequenced to date, and the data are publicly available. At the same time, the advances in large-scale expression and purification of recombinant proteins have paved the way for structural genomics efforts. Frequently, however, little is known about newly expressed proteins calling for large-scale protein characterization to better understand their biochemical roles and to enable structure function relationship studies. In the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), we have established a platform to characterize large numbers of purified proteins. This includes screening for ligands, enzyme assays, peptide arrays and peptide displacement in a 384-well format. In this review, we describe this platform in more detail and report on how our approach significantly increases the success rate for structure determination. Coupled with high-resolution X-ray crystallography and structure-guided methods, this platform can also be used toward the development of chemical probes through screening families of proteins against a variety of chemical series and focused chemical libraries. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.