EU infrastructure grant awarded to Molecular Biophysics consortium

The European Commission has awarded an INFRAIA infrastructure grant to a consortium of 15 European academic and industrial key research hotspots working in the field of molecular biophysics. The 5 M€ project serves to start an integrating activity of the research and development efforts in this field. By pooling the access to the various biophysical techniques, available at the different partners, a strong pan-european molecular biophysics network will be built. This is essential to maintain Europe's leading position in this fast-developing field of research and development.

The network, called MOSBRI, provides effective and convenient access to the best research infrastructures. Herewith, key national and regional research infrastructures are brought together and are integrated on European scale by providing access to the facilities for European researchers from both academia and industry. It ensures the optimal use of these advanced techniques and it fosters joint development to further boost the advancement of knowledge and technology.

The MOSBRI community

The MOSBRI community includes 2 industrial partners as well as 13 academic centres of excellence from 11 different European countries. All of them have unique and complementary expertise, offering biophysics services to researchers from any EU country. In Groningen, three research groups from the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials take part, the Patrick van der Wel Lab, The Rifka Vlijm lab and the Wouter Roos lab. These labs provide access to their advanced solid State NMR, STED super-resolution microscopy, High speed AFM and Optical Tweezers set-ups.

In this manner facilitates and promotes Groningen the integration of the European Molecular Biophysics research field. That this has wide-spread impact is clear as molecular biophysics is located at the crossroads of a variety of disciplines, holding a strategic position critical to cellular, molecular and structural biology, to biological chemistry, as well as to biomedicine, bio-production and biotechnology. Next to providing access to research infrastructures, MOSBRI will also disseminate its know-how and achievements through an attractive programme of training workshops and meetings. The work of MOSBRI will start in the Summer of 2021 and the website has been launched.

Website: https://www.mosbri.eu/

For more information: w.h.roos@rug.nl