Instruct-Barcelona

Scientific and Technical Center of the University of Barcelona (CCiTUB)

The NMR instruments at CCiTUB have been part of the Spanish national infrastructure for biomolecular NMR since 2000. Initially a single-site facility, it was expanded in 2018 to form a distributed infrastructure together with the Bilbao and Madrid nodes. These three sites now offer independent access through Instruct-ERIC, with the Barcelona node formally integrated into the European infrastructure in 2025.

In 2022, the CCiTUB installed Europe’s first 1 GHz NMR spectrometer equipped with a high-temperature superconducting magnet, marking a major milestone in high-field NMR technology. Further upgrades followed in 2024, with new consoles and cryoprobes on the 800 MHz and 600 MHz instruments. The 800 MHz system now includes direct heteronuclear detection capabilities, enabling advanced studies of biomolecular structure and dynamics, particularly for intrinsically disordered proteins and biologics.

The NMR laboratory at the Scientific and Technical Center of the University of Barcelona (CCiTUB) is located within the Barcelona Science Park (PCB), a leading research hub in Southern Europe. The facility is part of the Spanish national infrastructure R-LRB and has recently joined the European network Instruct-ERIC, offering advanced NMR services to both expert and non-expert users.

The service provides access to high-field liquid-state NMR spectrometers (1.0 GHz, 800 MHz, and 600 MHz), equipped with cryoprobes and direct heteronuclear detection capabilities. These instruments support a wide range of applications in structural biology, drug discovery, and biologics characterisation, including the study of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs).

While protein NMR is often considered a sophisticated technique, the facility offers guidance and support to users with varying levels of expertise. Local research groups and expert staff assist in experimental design, sample preparation, and data interpretation, helping researchers identify how NMR can address their scientific questions.

IBMB-CSIC-ALBA cryo-Electron Microscopy Facility

The IBMB-CSIC cryo-EM Platform was born in 2022 with the aim of filling the needs of the structural biology community in the East of Spain. The platform allocates a 200kV Glacios cryo-microscope equipped with an autoloader and a Falcon 4 direct electron detector. The platform is part of the Joint Electron Microscopy Center at ALBA (JEMCA), located at the ALBA synchrotron. The facility is specialized in rapid optimization and screening of difficult samples, including purified endogenous proteins, membrane proteins and proteins with low molecular weights (below 100 kDa). The platform is equipped with a GloCube Plus glow discharge system and two devices for sample vitrification, a Vitrobot Mark IV system and a Leica EM GP plunge freezing. The presence of an AKTA Pure protein purification system in the same laboratory, available to the public users, allows the purification of macromolecular complexes just before vitrification. A GPU workstation is also available for on-the-fly data processing, reaching 2D classification for the initial check of sample quality.

ALBA synchrotron

ALBA, the Spanish synchrotron facility, is serving the worldwide scientific and industrial communities with state-of-the-art X-ray beamlines, instruments and services. The supported experiments produce over 300 publications per annum with an average impact factor of 9,5 (2024). 

ALBA synchrotron (Barcelona, Spain) started user operation in 2012 and has gradually grown to currently operate 13 beamlines and several microscopes and services, providing access to fragment screening, serial crystallography and soft and hard X-ray tomography, among others. ALBA is now geared towards its upgrade to a 4th generation facility, ALBA-II. The project, which is on schedule to see the new photon beam on 2031, includes the construction of 3 new beamlines and the upgrade of the operating ones. 

Since 2025, three ALBA beamlines are included in the portfolio of Instruct: 

XALOC is a mature MX beamline with more than 1200 structures solved (2025). The beamline has recently updated the detector and the robot, and offers wavelength-dependent and jet-based SSX experiments. Onsite, remote and unattended access modes are available. 

XAIRA, the new micro-MX beamline operating since 2025, provides a high-flux beam of 3×3 µm² size. The beamline can host fixed-target SSX experiments, as well as low-background rotation and optimal native-phasing experiments by enclosing the entire end-station in a recirculating helium atmosphere. Onsite and remote experiments are available. 

MISTRAL provides access to cryo soft X-ray tomography to resolve the 3D structure of whole vitrified cells of up to 10 um thickness and depth at near native conditions at ~30nm resolution, as well as to perform cryo-spectromicroscopy experiments to locate oligoelements. A cryo 3D-SIM microscope is available to select offline the samples in the grid to collect. Typically MISTRAL is able to collect a hundred tomograms from two full grids per day. 

Visitor information

 Show Visitor Details