Instruct ULTRA

Widening Instruct-ERIC access to the Imaging Community

 

One of the aims of Instruct-ULTRA is to widen the reach of Instruct-ERIC to new communities where structural biology is less well known. The European Molecular Imaging Meeting (EMIM), 19-22 March, provided a great opportunity to co-host a session with Euro-BioImaging to introduce these two research infrastructures.

A particular highlight was the captivating talk by Prof Bruno Klaholz from the Instruct-FR centre, which captured the advances in cryo-EM and their application in understanding the structure and function of the human ribosome. By accurate and detailed imaging, scientists have been able to examine the 3D interactions between ribosomes and rRNA, and study the antiproliferative effects of eukaryotic antibiotic that reveal the human ribosome as a promising cancer target. The visualisation of structures to 2.9 Å is advancing the new field of cryo-EM structure-based drug design. 

As Bruno explained, the developing interface between structural biology and imaging is the future of molecular imaging, and the cutting-edge technologies available through Euro-BioImaging and Instruct-ERIC are a valuable resource for European researchers. 

Kelly Sheehan-Rooney and Alessandra Viale also provided an insight into services and industry links for Euro-BioImaging, and Naomi Gray introduced services and training available through Instruct-ERIC. 

“The shared session at EMIM was a great opportunity for the EMIM community to see how the services and technologies from different infrastructures can support their multi-disciplinary and multimodal imaging research.” Kelly Sheehan-Rooney, Euro-BioImaging. 

Click here for more information about Cryo-EM services available through Instruct-ERIC.

 

Further reading:

Kundhavai Natchiar, S. et al., (2017) Visualization of chemical modifications in the human 80S ribosome structure, Nature 551:472–477.

von Loeffelholz, O. et al., (2018) Volta phase plate data collection facilitates image processing and cryo-EM structure determination, J. Struct. Biol. 202:191-199.