Infrastructure

Wednesday, 21 December 2011 15:01 Last Updated on Friday, 27 November 2015 12:26 Written by Administrator

One of the main axes of the SEE-DRUG Action Plan proposal principal axis is the establishment of an S&T Infrastructure to face new challenges in chemical and structural biology, drug design and preclinical drug screening. Therefore, SEE-DRUG Action plan has as a major axe the Upgrade and Renewal of the S&T Equipment of the UPAT facilities on protein production, NMR instrumentation, crystallization and complementary techniques, such as imaging, of great importance in the study of protein-protein/small molecule interactions and pharmacology.

The following activities are foreseen:

Upgrade the UPAT NMR capacity in Structural Biology by acquisition of a state-of-the-art high-field NMR Spectrometer with enhanced sensitivity for efficient screening of peptides and proteins prior to NMR studies, crystallization efforts and X-ray structural studies.
A high-field NMR instrument, such as a 700 MHz NMR with a cryogenically cooled probe for enhanced sensitivity, in concert with uniformly or selectively enriched recombinant proteins (in 13C, 15N and 2H), will enable SEE-DRUG members, national and regional research groups to study large proteins with molecular weight above 10 kDa.

NMR Room at the new Pharmacy Builging

Acquisition of a Crystallization Robot, which will be coupled with the NMR facility. Initial screening of protein-targets with NMR (to confirm, folding, oligomerization state, solubility etc.) will be followed by crystallization screening conditions in order to produce protein-substrate/drug complexes. The coupling of the two instruments will be time and cost-effective since it will reduce the false attempts to crystallize structureless or self-aggregating proteins.

Upgrade of the UPAT Advance Light Microscopy Facility. Upgrading of the existing Confocal Microscopy Facility, will comprise, according to our knowledge, a unique facility in Greece for its capacities, properties and applications. This equipment will be operated by an expert in confocal and functional microscopy, in collaboration with experts in molecular biology, in NMR and in in vivo assays.

Upgrade the UPAT molecular pharmacology laboratory bioactivity testing capacity with an Intravital Microscope and a set of Myographs.