International Research Infrastructures ‐ New research opportunities for biochemists and molecular biologists

Abstract

In Europe, biomedical research infrastructures joined forces in the CORBEL project (www.corbel.project.eu) to offer international scientists open‐access to a wide range of state‐of‐the‐art technology platforms, resources and services in the fields of chemical biology/drug discovery (www.eu‐openscreen.eu), medical and biological imaging (www.eurobioimaging.eu), structural biology (www.structuralbiology.eu), mouse models (www.infrafrontier.eu), clinical resarch (www.ecrin.org), databases (www.elixir‐europe.org), biobanks (www.bbmri‐eric.eu), microbiology (www.mirri.org), marine biology (www.embrc.eu), systems biology (http://project.isbe.eu) and translational research (https://eatris.eu).In the field of Chemical Biology, the academic initiative EU‐OPENSCREEN (www.eu‐openscreen.eu) integrates high‐capacity screening platforms and medicinal chemistry groups throughout Europe. Researchers from academic institutions, SMEs and industrial organisations from around the world can access the rationally selected EU‐OPENSCREEN compound collection, comprising up to 140.000 commercial and proprietary compounds collected from European chemists, to develop novel molecular tool compounds for the validation of novel biological targets, in collaboration with its partner screening platforms and medicinal chemistry groups. Molecular biologists and biochemists who have a robust and suitable assay and are interested in developing a chemical ‘tool’ compound (i.e. inhibitor or activator) for their target‐of‐interest are invited to contact us to discuss their research project. After the screening and identification of active hit compounds, researchers can collaborate with EU‐OPENSCREEN's medicinal chemistry groups during the hit‐to‐tool optimisation, use the imaging facilities of Euro‐BioImaging to characterise the biological effect of the identified compounds, or access INSTRUCT to gain structural information of the biological target.I will highlight these research infrastructures in more detail and explain how international biochemists and molecular biologists can access and collaborate with these research infrastructures to advance their research projects.Support or Funding InformationThis project (CORBEL) receives funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 654248.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.