Activities



The I3 consists of three different activities: Networking, Transnational Access and Joint Research Activities. Integration among these activities if the core of the initiative.

Networking Activities
The Networking activities consists of the organisation of Round tables and Workshops as well as the setup of Virtual Research Infrastructure.

  • Round Tables The presentations of the Round Table of January 2010 can be downloaded here
    The objective of the Round Tables is to shape the future of the RIs in Magnetic Resonance in the Life Sciences in the context of the European Research Area. The Round Tables are regular meetings of representatives of all RIs for bio-NMR participating in the network, together with some members of the International Science Council, to discuss the activities to be pursued on the basis of studies and analyses performed, and the recommendations of expert groups. The studies and analyses, and the setting up of expert groups are instigated by the Round Table and delegated by the coordinator of the subproject to specific task groups. As a result of the discussions the Round table may decide to define, organise and manage common initiatives.
  • Workshops
    The objective of the Workshops is to improve the quality and efficiency of access offered by the RIs for bio-NMR to the biological research community in Europe. There will be two types of workshops, training workshops and workshops dealing with realising the exchange and dissemination of good practice. An additional element in the training workshops may be the exchange of personnel.
  • Virtual Research Infrastructure (vRI)
    The objective of the Virtual Research Infrastructure (vRI) is on the one hand to provide RIs in the network with all information gathered by the partners. This information will allow them to improve the quality and efficiency of their access program by adapting the procedures and techniques described there. On the other the vRI will act hand as the medium through which the biological research community will be informed on the possibilities offered by the RIs. It will also be the medium that takes care of general publicity and raising the awareness of the general public to the results of bio-NMR mediated research.

Transnational Access Activity (TA) -- See the Statistics on Performance
EU-NMR provides individual researchers and research teams from European Countries with access to a distributed Research Infrastructure (dRI) of five major national centers with some 200 scientific and technical support staff, representing over 100,000,000 € in investments in state-of-the-art, fully equipped NMR spectrometers and ancillary equipment, and modern laboratories for bio-NMR. It is the world's largest center for bio-NMR devoted to deciphering the structure, function and activity of biomolecules at the molecular and macroscopic level. The complementary and research in the dRI ensures that research teams from all over Europe will have access to the most advanced tools available for answering their research questions. The combined RIs can provide access to instruments best suited to solve the posed questions, have dedicated educational programs for training researchers on the use of NMR, and have a tradition in furthering the awareness of the potential of bio-NMR. They are able to provide in-depth education for PhD students, post-docs and external users on the potential of NMR for structure/function/pathway analysis. The scientific support for users is extensive.
The RIs providing access to their instrumentations are:

Joint Research Activities (JRA)
The proposed activities aim at developing innovative core technologies that enable to increase the scope, application portfolio and quality of access for RIs in bio-NMR with respect to:
  • Fast, efficient data acquisition modalities for multi-dimensional NMR in order to establish an efficient and cost-effective service network;
  • Strategies to exploit heteronuclear Nuclear Magnetic Resonance in liquids and solids;
  • Integration and development of orientation dependent NMR structural data (solid state and high-resolution) into a common package for 3D structure determination of biomolecules.

All technologies to be developed aim at improving the efficiency of the structure determination process. Two deal with the development of new hardware and associated software for increasing the sensitivity and/or resolution of NMR experiments. The first aims at speeding up the data acquisition process. This would enable higher throughput structure determination, but the technique would also be very advantageous for drug screening and metabolomics. Several possible approaches have been described, but a critical evaluation is lacking and the methods have thus far not been implemented in production environments. Most researchers that are at the forefront of these developments are involved in the proposal.
The innovative aspects of the second development lie in the realization that liquid state and solid state NMR spectroscopy, historically two separated worlds, have both matured to a point where cross-fertilization is possible. It intends to bring cryogenic technology to solid state NMR and builds on previous experience to develop technology for low nuclei direct detection probes, enabling NMR for very large molecules. Cryogenic probes are important in solid state NMR because they increase the sensitivity by a factor of 2-4, improving their potential for generating structural restraints for proteins and the study of systems with restricted motion. The developments would raise the molecular mass limit for the NMR experiment. Again, several approaches have been described, but none has led yet to probes that can be used routinely. Research teams and a company that are at the forefront of these developments are involved in the project.
Both technological developments are well suited to generate orientation dependent structural parameters and as such provide the impetus for the development of the necessary software tools that can cope in a routine and integrated way with these parameters in addition to the more "standard" parameters in the structure determination process. In this context the incorporation of solid state NMR data in conjunction with the data from solution NMR provides an innovative approach that should lead to a much better integration of solid-state and high resolution NMR experiments and data for the structure determination process. The major development teams for advanced software tools for bio-NMR are involved in the project.