Welcome to the Instruct newsletter where you will find a description of activities taking place at the Hub and the Centres of Instruct-ERIC. We are getting ready for the Instruct Biennial Structural Biology Conference which will take place in Alcalá de Henares next May. Registration is now open, and we have confirmed all speakers. This is an opportunity to share the great scientific work carried out through access to Instruct facilities, register now and upload your abstract!
Membership of Instruct-ERIC is continuously expanding, in the last few months Spain joined Instruct-ERIC,a ceremony will take place at the Biennial with participation of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. We also welcome Latvia as our twelfth member country. We are looking forward to future collaborations, access to the infrastructure and all other benefits open to researchers in Latvia from January.
We have now concluded the update of our catalogue of technologies to reflect the rapid changes taking place in the landscape of structural biology; have a look, apply for access and send us your feedback. We have opened our annual calls for training activities including courses and internships and we will keep you informed of the results in the next few weeks. We also have updated the ARIA guidelines .
Instruct-ERIC is also proud to announce that in the New Year we will be participating in three new Horizon 2020 projects, RI-VIS (increasing the international visibility of research infrastructures), ERIC Forum (organisation and networking of European Research Infrastructure Consortia or “ERICs”) and EOSC-Life (Providing an open collaborative space for digital biology in Europe) which you can read more about here. Thank you to all who played their part and we look forward to continuing working together towards a bigger and better Instruct-ERIC.
The Instruct –FRISBI course on preparation and characterization of macromolecular complexes took place from 19-23 November hosted by IGBMC.
"Strasbourg University delegation for establishing academic partnership in India: meetings with the Indian Institute of Technology of New Dehli, Bombay and Madras, Indian Institute of Science of Bangalore. Extended presentation and discussions were given in Bengalore and Madras to the structural biology and molecular biophysics departments" (from 5 to 9 November).
Arnaud Poterszman acknowledged Instruct at his talk in Lisbon at the: 10th Annual PEGS Europe “Protein and Antibody Engineering Summit” conference on the 12th-16th of November.
Bruno Klaholz and Tat Cheng presented the Instruct/FRISBI cryo-EM platform of the Instruct-centre France 1 at the Aviesan/CNRS conference “How cryo-electron microscopy meets chemical structure” (14-15 November).
FRISBI the French infrastructure for Integrated Structural Biology is organizing the fourth FRISBI annual user meeting, on the 13th of December at Gif/Yvette, France. Instruct will be introduced and the link between the European and national infrastructure emphasized.
Congratulations to Bruno Klaholz who received the prestigious CNRS Silver Medal for his involvement in technological advances in CryoEM
The first Nanobodies4Instruct practical training course took place in Brussels from 9 to 19 September. The workshop was hosted by the Steyaert lab.
The 4th Instruct Biennial Structural Biology Conference will be hosted by Spain in Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, from 22-24 May, 2019. Registration is now open.
The Natl. Center of Biotechnology (CSIC, Madrid, Spain) has been awarded funding to purchase a high-end electron microscope along with other microscopes for electron tomography and ion beam milling in early 2019. Read more here.
Drs. Olsen, Medalia, Carazo, and Plückthun have been awarded an ERC Synergy project for studying the structure and conformational changes of the Epidermal Growth Factor.
Following on the success of the first Instruct Workshop on CryoEM best practices held in Harwell in May 2017, NeCEN organised the second version that took place in Leiden, Netherlands on 15-16 Oct 2018. The presentations are now available through the workshop website.
New and upgraded equipment has been received at CIISB and it is now offered for access in the areas of Mass Spectrometry and CryoEM.
Meetings and workshops at CIISB included the 2ndUser Meeting of the Czech Infrastructure for Structural Biology, the 1st Symposium on recent advances in CryoEM and the Instruct-CIISB course on fragment and small molecule screening.
Two Instruct-ULTRA partners (ITQB and CSIC) have recently been successful in a bid for funding from CYTED, a funding agency that promotes scientific cooperation between countries in Latin America, Spain and Portugal. The project coordinated by Margarida Archer (ITQB) will support scientific exchange and training in integrative structural biology, focusing on cryo-electron Microscopy, and links with work package 3 and 4 of Instruct-ULTRA. Rodrigo Portugal the head of the new cryo-EM facility in Campinas, Brazil recently gave a plenary lecture sponsored by Instruct-ULTRA at the Second Instruct Workshop on cryo-EM best practices held at Leiden 15-16 Oct 2018. To view a podcast of the talk, click here. Together, these initiatives are contributing to developing the international profile of Instruct-ERIC.
A new software protocol based on ISPyB web services is being developed by the University of Oulu (Finland), together with the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) and Diamond (UK), for the exchange of crystallization and diffraction meta data between the laboratory information management systems of home labs and synchrotrons. This innovative solution will benefit all structural biologists with in-house crystallization facilities and enhance the remote use of synchrotrons for collection of data. The project is led by Rik Wierenga as part of work package 4 of Instruct-ULTRA and was recently presented at the SESAME & Instruct-ERIC Workshop on Remote X-ray Data Collection from European Synchrotrons at the Weizmann Institute of Science: 14-18, May 2018. To view podcasts from the workshop click here.
West-LIFE/ CORBEL developer and project manager Natalie Haley, Instruct project manager Claudia Alén Amaro and Hub Coordinator Susan Daenke participated in CORBEL Workpackage working groups and management committees. The end of the year marks the end of the 2nd CORBEL Open Call for research projects which has been hosted using Instruct-ERIC access management system ARIA.
CORBEL strives towards harmonisation and interoperability within the 13 biomedical research infrastructures. The Open Calls have been a key achievement of the project, offering users integrated access to the BMS research infrastructures. Instruct-ERIC is proud to have played a crucial role in the Open Calls. Also within CORBEL, Instruct has participated in training workshops and staff exchanges.
| 4 Jul | Claudia was a participant of the 'Train the trainer' workshop organised by CORBEL in Amsterdam. In this workshop experienced trainers came together to learn new ideas and tools to improve the training that they deliver. |
| 5 Jul | Susan gave a talk at the meeting of the Structural Biology Community in Portugal PCISBIO Day 2018 at ITQB Nova. |
| 13-17 Aug | Instruct-ERIC was delighted to host visiting project manager Katja Herzog from EU-OPENSCREEN as part of the CORBEL Staff exchange. Read more about it in our website. |
| 12 Sept | Claudia participated of the official inauguration of the electron Bio-Imaging Centre eBIC at Diamond Light Source. |
| 23-28 Sept | Instruct-CZ organised the FEBS Practical course "Hydrodynamic and thermodynamic analysis of biological macromolecules and their interactions". |
| 27 Sept | Workshop on Horizon 2020 audit practices organised at BEIS by UKRO. |
| 1-2 Oct | Validation workshop organised by Horizon 2020 project InRoad which is looking into research infrastructures national and European road maps. |
| 9-11 Oct | Twba, Fiona and Natalie participated in the Digital Infrastructure for research 2018 conference in Lisbon. At the conference, topics were wide-ranging including identifiers, the European Open Science Cloud, Authorisation and Authentication systems, data security and more. |
| 31 Oct | Meeting at the Wellcome Trust in London of the Instruct-ERIC Council. |
| 12-13 Nov | Workshop organised by Horizon 2020 project RI-Path on evaluating impact of research infrastructures. |
| 19-23 Nov | INSTRUCT- FRISBI course on preparation and characterization of macromolecular complexes. |
| 20 Nov | Meeting of the Instruct Computational Structural Biology Group. With the end of West-Life, Instruct has been involved in the legacy of project. The new home for the Instruct Computational Services, adopted from West-Life, can be found at https://instruct-eric.eu/compute. |
| 21-23 Nov | Staff exchange organised by ECRIN for CORBEL and RI-Train. |
| 27-29 Nov | ERIC-Forum meeting in Seville organised by Life-Watch with participation of the European Commission and the ERIC committee. |
| 29 Nov | ARIA Version 2.1 was launched. The new version brings new features such as role-based help guides, new forums, admin page search, and a customisable admin panel dashboard. Read all about it here. |
Please note that the Instruct Hub will be closed 24/12/2018 to 01/01/2019. During that time, there may be no-one available to respond to queries but you can still submit and process proposals. Happy Holidays from Instruct-ERIC!
More News and Events:
More about these and other news at www.instruct-eric.eu or everyday on Twitter @Instructhub
Past newsletters are available on our website.
