27-Aug-2021
As part of its ongoing collaboration with Latin America in the context of the EU-LAC ResInfra project, Instruct-ERIC opened a staff exchange call to allow researchers from Latin American institutions to visit European facilities.
The call invited researchers from any Latin American institution which has a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Instruct-ERIC to submit an application to utilise the equipment and machineries available at Instruct’s European centres.
Three researchers will be visiting Instruct-ERIC facilities, accessing the equipment and sharing best practises and guidance with the host institutions to further advance research and understanding not only of the structural biology techniques but also of the procedures to allow open access to the infrastructure.
Roberto Kopke Salinas of University of Sao Paulo (USP) will be visiting the Bijvoet Centre at Instruct-NL Utrecht University (UU), utilising the highly sensitive Bruker NMR Spectrometers for analysis of the Type IV Secretion System (T4SS) of the phytopathogen Xanthomonas citri.
The aim of the exchange is to share best practises between institutions on NMR spin relaxation – how best to prepare samples and analyse results. Utilising the ultra-high sensitivity of the UU spectrometer (which offers 900 and 1,200Hz) will yield incredibly useful results for the study, and the experience will allow the team to replicate the experiments with the 800Hz machine at USP.
Leonardo Alonso of University of Buenos Aires (UBA) is to visit EMBL-Hamburg, to access the mass spectrometry facilities at the Instruct Centre. The team have been studying deamidation of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein, and are seeking to determine which deamidations occur and what their functional significance is.
The team aims to characterise 4 mutant Spike proteins, and study their deamidation in a variety of environmental conditions to explore the effects of deamidation on the protein, and how it is selected for in nature.
Alejandro Buschiazzo of Institut Pasteur Montevideo (IPMontevideo) will visit The Instruct Image Processing Centre (I2PC) In Madrid, Spain, with the specific aim of training in Cryo-EM techniques. Buschiazzo’s lab at IPMontevideo currently conducts macromolecular X-ray crystallography, but is keen to incorporate Cryo-EM as a key technique available at the facility.
Hence, the staff exchange will provide experience for sample handling and data processing in Cryo-EM, working with the team at I2PC to solve the structure of full-length bacterial histidine kinases, and also to join ongoing efforts to study COVID19 variants and mutations.
The aim of all three staff exchanges is to share knowledge that would be crucial to the plans to set up regional access centres for structural biology in Latin America.
