Astbury opens doors to European collaborators
The University of Leeds’ Astbury Centre Biostructure Laboratory has today been awarded the status of an Instruct-ERIC facility.
The University of Leeds’ Astbury Centre Biostructure Laboratory has today been awarded the status of an Instruct-ERIC facility, prestigious recognition of the Centre’s world-class technology and expertise in structural biology.
This partnership will allow researchers from Europe to access the electron microscopy, NMR and mass spectrometry facilities within the Astbury Centre and the Faculty of Biological Sciences. The high-quality platforms like the ones within the Astbury Centre are a valuable addition to the Instruct technology catalogue, and align with Instruct-ERIC’s mission of supporting integrative structural biology.
To mark the occasion, researchers are being hosted today at a launch event at Nexus to welcome the Astbury Biostructure Laboratory to Instruct-UK.
What is Instruct-ERIC?
By bringing together cutting-edge technologies and the technical knowledge of specialist facilities across Europe, Instruct is at the frontier of the integrative approach to structural biology, helping to drive developments in life science.
Instruct-ERIC is a European organisation comprising 10 centres of excellence in structural biology across Europe, funded by 14-member countries. It provides a single point of access to technology, training and expertise for integrative structural biology for academic and industry researchers. As the UK is a member of Instruct, academic scientists working in the UK have full access to funding for research visits to our Instruct Centres and research sites.
The Astbury Centre
The Astbury Centre brings together researchers from across the University - largely from physics, the biological sciences and chemistry - to allow interdisciplinary approaches to be harnessed to understand the molecular basis of life. The Centre has outstanding expertise and research infrastructure in chemical biology, biophysics and all of the major techniques in structural molecular biology. Together, these approaches are combined with analyses of biological function with the ultimate aim of understanding the molecular basis of biological mechanisms in living cells. Our members address major questions associated with biological mechanisms in areas as diverse as membrane proteins; protein folding and assembly; viruses; and motor proteins. The Astbury Centre hosts 4-year PhD programmes funded by the Wellcome Trust and BBSRC that recruit students with the wide range of expertise that may be used to address fundamental biological questions
Further information
For further information please contact Rebecca Thompson on r.f.thompson@leeds.ac.uk
