Opening ceremony of the Swiss NMR Facility
The Basel site of the Swiss NMR Facility is in operation for a couple of years, the recent delivery of the 1.2 GHz spectrometer marked the opening of the Zurich site and was celebrated on the 9th of April with an inauguration event.
The meeting started off with greeting words from Nicole Schad from the State Secretary of Bildung, Forschung und Innovation (SFBI), the dean of our Science Faculty, Roland Sigel, and the Vice Rectors Research of ETH and UniBas, Christian Wolfrum and Primo Schär.
The very good turnout of experts in the afternoon scientific session was the more surprising as one of the big NMR conferences was taking place at the same time! The afternoon program started with a nice historic wrap up from Rolf Boelens using the Lac repressor as its prime protagonist. He described how the influence of technical advances of the spectrometer were tightly linked to scientific progress. Following talks by Haribabu Arthanari, Markus Weingarth, Harald Schwalbe, Roberta Pieratelli, Martin Blackledge and Christian Griesinger then described latest advances both in methodology and applications to proteins and nuclei acids, quite often touching on how ultra-high field NMR contributes to the development of novel drugs, in particular antibiotics and anti-cancer drugs, or to hot topics in biology such as IDPs. A short session with our new assistant professor Ricarda Törner and junior colleagues from groups of the three partnering research institutions highlighted successful projects conducted at UniBas, ETH-Z and UZH and convincingly demonstrated that the success story of NMR will continue to develop in future. And of course, our friends and colleagues from the neighboring techniques in structural biology, cryo-EM and EPR (many thanks to Enrica Bordignon and Werner Kühlbrandt for their superb talks!), highlighted how these techniques complement modern structural biology, each with its specific strengths.
The full program is enlisted below:
| 12:45 - 13:15 | Prof. em. Rolf Boelens, Utrecht University, The Netherlands A tale of Lac and NMR |
| 13:15 - 13:45 |
Prof. Haribabu Arthanari, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, USA |
| 13:45 - 14:45 |
Pitch Session with Prof. Ricarda Törner, Department of Chemistry, Universität Zürich, Switzerland Anna Leder, Biozentrum, Universität Basel, Switzerland Dr. Piotr Klukwoski, Institute for Molecular Physical Science, ETHZ, Switzerland Dr. Mihajlo Novakovic, Institute for Biochemistry, ETHZ, Switzerland Dr. Matthias Schuster, Department of Chemistry, UZH, Switzerland Dr. Silke Johannsen, Department of Chemistry, UZH, Switzerland |
| 14:45 - 15:15 | Coffee Break |
| 15:15 - 15:45 |
Prof. Markus Weingarth, Utrecht University, The Netherlands |
| 15:45 - 16:15 | Prof. Enrica Bordignon, Université de Genève, Switzerland Exploring the dynamic interplay between Bcl-2 proteins in the mitochondrial pathway of apoptosis |
| 16:15 - 16:45 | Prof. Werner Kühlbrandt, Max-Planck-Institut, Frankfurt, Germany Diffraction methods (cryoEM and crystallography) to study membrane protein structure and function |
| 16:45 - 17:15 | Prof. Harald Schwalbe, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Germany Focussing on NMR of RNA and DNA: Understanding their dynamics by (time-resolved) NMR and devloping new RNA targeting drugs |
| 17:15 - 17:30 | Break |
| 17:30 - 18:00 | Prof. Roberta Pierattelli, University of Florence, Italy Decoding order and disorder in proteins by NMR spectroscopy |
| 18:00 - 18:30 | Dr. Martin Blackledge, Institut de Biologie Structurale, Grenoble, France The unique ability of high field NMR to characterise the structure, dynamics and function of the intrinsically disordered proteome |
| 18:30 - 19:00 | Prof. Christian Griesinger, Max-Planck-Institut, Goettingen, Germany Fast kinetics by NMR and applications to neurodegeneration and protection |
Our 1.2 GHz is one out of presently 13 installed systems worldwide, and the second one of this class located in Switzerland. We have been discussing the purchase of such an instrument as early as 2013, and it was and continues to be very satisfying seeing it becoming a reality end in 2024!