Indispensable for characterizing structures, interactions, and functional processes
Instruct has 4 centres offering Solution NMR across Europe. Navigate the map and click on the pins to discover centres near you.
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) has evolved as the main technique to obtain structural information at atomic resolution in solution on macrobiomolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids. Nowadays solution NMR is an indispensable enabling technology for determining not only structures of such molecules but also their interactions, even weak and transient, as well as for characterizing functional processes in solution and also directly in living cells. The power of NMR resides in linking structural, dynamic, kinetic and thermodynamic information so as to make it a technique of choice in cutting-edge research in medicine and biology.
Solution NMR within INSTRUCT therefore provides a major approach to obtaining the molecular-level information needed to build networks of interactions responsible for vital cellular processes and to describe them at molecular level. Thanks to the recent hardware and software developments, its applicability ranges from supra-molecular structures to intrinsically unfolded proteins at almost physiological concentrations. Solution NMR offers unique possibilities to study dynamic processes at atomic resolution and over a very wide range of timescales, from picoseconds to hours, including folding mechanisms and transient formation of complexes. A computing grid is developing to help researchers to rapidly and efficiently perform structure calculations exploiting forefront approaches. A web portal, WeNMR (www.wenmr.eu), allows the scientists to have an easy interface where submitting all the data necessary for protein structure determination. With the WeNMR GRID computing any user can have access to state-of-the-art software tools and to extensively validated protocols for their use. In this way, scientists already involved in or wishing to make use of bio-NMR for the structural investigation of protein systems are free from the hassle of setting up, validating and updating their calculation protocols and, at the same time, can save on the cost of computational power.
