05-Feb-2026
The expansion of the Instruct Centre in Spain has now been officially launched, with access to cutting-edge technologies at the facilities now available through Instruct-ERIC.
For researchers in Instruct’s Member Countries and Organisations, funding is available for access to the facilities in Instruct Centre Spain. Find out more about funding for access through Instruct here.
Spain was one of the earliest Members in Instruct-ERIC, and the Instruct Image Processing Centre (I2PC) and the Cryo-EM facility at the CNB-CSIC in Madrid have long been the primary technologies accessible through Instruct Centre Spain.
In 2025, the Centre expanded, bringing several new facilities and unique technologies to the Instruct catalogue of services. See the full list below:
| City | Facility | Technology |
| Madrid | CNB-CSIC | Cryo-EM |
| Madrid | CNB-CSIC | Image Processing and Flexibility Hub |
| Madrid | CNB-CSIC | NMR |
| Bilbao | Fundacíon Biofisika | Cryo-EM |
| Bilbao | CIC-Biogune | NMR |
| Barcelona | ALBA | Cryo-Soft X-ray Tomography |
| Barcelona | ALBA | MX |
| Barcelona | CSIC at ALBA | Cryo-EM |
| Barcelona | University of Barcelona | NMR |
With the Centre launch event held in Madrid 29-30 January 2026, facility leads from each institution gave an introduction to the technologies available to access through Instruct.
At the Instruct Facility in Madrid, a new virtual screening service has been added to the service offer in I2PC and new NMR capabilities have now been added provided by the LMR laboratory. The facility includes a novel biosolid NMR spectrometer equipped with a first-generation CPMAS CryoProbe, creating the unique opportunity to combine liquid- and solid-state NMR methodologies.
In Bilbao, researchers can access technologies at the Fundacíon Biofisika, which specialises in Cryo-EM in the Basque Resource for Electron Microscopy (BREM), with equipment in electron microscopy and electron tomography. Bilbao also includes the CIC-Biogune, which has a range of high field NMR spectrometers, including a 1GHz one, for a wide variety of samples, with dedicated protein and glycan sample preparation with stable isotope (13C, 15N, 2H) or chemical (19F) labelling.
NMR is also available through the University of Barcelona, with Europe’s first 1GHz NMR spectrometer equipped with a high-temperature superconducting magnet when it was installed in 2022. Barcelona is also home to ALBA, which offers access to three beamlines in the synchrotron for Instruct users, allowing use macromolecular crystallography, Fragment-screening platforms and soft X-Ray tomography at the facility. In addition, the Cryo-EM facility at IBMB-CSIC-ALBA is available to access through Instruct.
The significant expansion of the Spanish Centre widens the services available to access through Instruct, with more specialist equipment for specific structural analysis. In addition to the expanded Instruct Centre in Spain, the new Centre in Germany offers a wide variety of technologies for structural biology research. Find out more about the Centre in Germany here.
