Instruct Newsletter – August 2018

Summary









Welcome to the Instruct newsletter where you will find a description of activities taking place at the Hub and the Centres of Instruct-ERIC. This has been an eventful few months for Instruct. In addition to welcoming Spain to the Instruct-ERIC at a ceremony organised by the Ministry of Economy and Industry in Madrid; the Instruct Centres met in Portugal to take stock and plan future directions for the infrastructure. In the last few months Instruct has been working on renewing the catalogue of technologies offered to reflect the rapid changes taking place in the landscape of structural biology. We have announce the awardees of the 2018 Instruct R&D pilot scheme as well as the successful Internship applicants. Our thanks to all who played their part and we look forward to continue working together towards a bigger and better Instruct-ERIC.

News and events from the Hub

Ongoing

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. After a successful first CORBEL call, further calls using Instruct access management system ARIA has been open to offer users integrated access to the BMS research infrastructures. Instruct organised an ARIA training event for Research Managers, which took place in Amsterdam in February 2018 and, in conjunction with the CORBEL webinar series, held a webinar on ARIA which is available online.

Ongoing

ARIA software developer Fiona Sanderson and Claudia Alén Amaro participated in the iNEXT annual users and iNEXT industry meetings which took place in Grenoble March this year. iNEXT utilises Instruct access management software ARIA for their proposal submission and access management. In February 2018 a workshop was organised in Amsterdam to train access managers on how to navigate through ARIA new features and gather feedback for future developments.

Ongoing

Horizon 2020 project Instruct-ULTRA, coordinated from the Instruct-Hub had its first annual meeting which took place on 7-8th of March in Oxford organised by Naomi Gray Instruct-ULTRA project manager and Ray Owens project Coordinator. Instruct-ULTRA is a Horizon 2020 Infradev-3 project coordinated by Instruct. It aims to accelerate the expanded implementation of Instruct by opening its services up to new members in Europe and partnerships at the global level; and increasing the effectiveness of user access to key technologies, working as appropriate with manufacturers and other industry stakeholders.

19-21 March

Ray Owens represented Instruct at the ARBRE-MOBIEU plenary symposium in Warsaw ‘Talking molecules: the networks that shape the living world’

21-22 March

Susan Daenke represented Instruct at the Bulgarian Presidency Flagship conference in research infrastructure

22-23 March

Our collaboration with our BMS research infrastructures colleagues continues, Ray Owens gave a talk at the EMBRIC meeting ‘A successful road from organisms to molecular tools that took place in Berlin

3 April

Instruct-ERIC moved to our new offices, you can find us now at  Oxford House, Parkway Court, John Smith Drive, Oxford, OX4 2JY, UK or call us +44 (0)1865 988639

 

8-14 April

Instruct financial officer Lorraine Donaldson visited the university of Bonn in a ERASMUS + exchange

19-20 April

Instruct welcomed ERIC representatives to Oxford for the 2nd ERIC Forum meeting. The Forum brings together established ERICs and major Research Infrastructures with those that are progressing towards ERIC status through the ESFRI Roadmap. Its objectives are to develop visibility, impact and sustainability of the Research Infrastructures and support international research through cooperative actions.

16-17 May

Representatives from Instruct Centres and invited institutions in the process of applying to become new Instruct Centres met in Viana to discuss new directions for Instruct-ERIC. Expect calls for new technologies to be offered as a result of the discussions.

25 May

Naomi Gray and Natalie Haley in the Hub made sure that Instruct-ERIC arrived prepared for GDPR. You can read all about it in our website.

1 June

Instruct Director Dave Stuart and Susan Daenke from the Hub and Jose Maria Carazo from Instruct-ES participated of the ceremony organised by the Ministry of Economy and Industry in Madrid in which Spain joined Instruct-ERIC

11 June

Twba Al-Shaghdri joined the Hub as our new developer, she joined the team to continue to develop ARIA, which is used to administer proposal submission for Instruct and collaborating projects.

18-19 June

Natalie Haley and Naomi Gray participated on the Quality Management expert meeting organised by Infrasfrontier in Munich

21-22 June

Naomi Gray and Claudia Alén Amaro attended the UKRO annual meeting held in Southampton, UK

25-26 June

Claudia Alén Amaro participated on the MERIL-Interoperability Workshop in Athens

 

News and events from Instruct Centres

From Instruct France 1

Registration is now open for an Instruct –FRISBI course on preparation and characterisation of macromolecular complexes taking place from 19-23 November hosted by IGBMC. Application deadline 23rd September.

Arnaud Poterszman presented at the “Cell line development & engineering” conference June 12-14, 2018, San Francisco, US.

Bruno Klaholz presented posters at the Gordon conference “Three Dimensional Electron microscopy” June 3-8, 2018 Newport, USA.

Valérie Lamour will be at the Gordon Conference DNA Topoisomerases in Biology and Medicine Conference July 31st -Aug 3rd 2018, USA and at the l'Association française de Cristallographie meeting, July 2018 Lyon.

From Instruct ES

The 4th Instruct Biennial Structural Biology Conference will be hosted by Spain at the Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, from May 22 till May 24, 2019. Registration will open in July 2018.

From Instruct Italy

Roberta Pierattelly presented her Instruct work at the second Adriatic NMR Conference held on June 15-17, 2018, in Mali Ston, Croatia.

From Nanobodies4Instruct

The first Nanobodies4Instruct practical training course will take place in Brussels from 9 to 19 September. The workshop will be hosted by the Steyaertlab.

From Instruct NL

Following on the success of the first Instruct Workshop on CryoEM best practices held in Harwell in May 2017 (link), NeCEN is organising the second version that will take place in Leiden, Netherlands on 15-16 Oct 2018. You can register for a place via the website.

From Instruct Israel

In collaboration with Open-SESAME Instruct-Israel organised a workshop on Remote X-ray Data Collection Workshop at the Weizmann Institute 14-18 May 2018.

From Instruct CZ

New and upgraded equipment has been received at CIISB and it is now offered for access in the areas of Mass Spectrometry both at BioCEV and CEITEC and CryoEM. Meetings and workshops at CIISB included the 2nd User 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. Registrations are open for the advance course co-organised with FEBS on Hydrodynamic and thermodynamic analysis of biological macromolecules and their interactions to take place the 23-28 September 2018 in Prague doi:10.1038/nbt.3994.

News from Instruct ULTRA



One of the key objectives of Instruct-ULTRA is to support the development of collaborations with academic groups outside of Europe and with industry. Following a call for proposals from the partners of Instruct-ULTRA, five projects have been selected for funding. Three involve links with commercial partners and two aim to build collaborations with groups outside of the current Instruct-ERIC membership. Progress on these projects will be reported on the Instruct-ULTRA website over the next year and show-cased in coming newsletters.










Partners

Project Title

MU and Vienna University

Nuclear magnetic resonance paramagnetic relaxation methods for studies of intrinsically disordered proteins. 

ITQB - UNL and CSIC

Expanding cryo Electron Microscopy to Latin America

UU (Leiden) and Nexperion

Design of a UV sterilization device for cryoEM samples

KI and industrial partner

Protein therapeutics

NHRF and Uni-Pharma

Structural studies of intrinsically disordered proteins towards the development of formulations for market- oriented pharmaceutical products.

 

 

 

More News and Events:

More about these and other news at instruct-eric.eu or everyday on Twitter @Instructhub 

Past newsletters are available on our website.