Final Report Summary - EU-NMR (European network of research infrastructures for providing access and technological advancements in bio-NMR)
The project partners aimed to expand the application envelope for bio-NMR techniques through raising scientists' awareness for the benefits that bio-NMR could generate in their research by executing the following tightly linked activities:
1. networking the RIs for bio-NMR operating at the local, regional, national or European level into an integrated structure with transparent access and mutual referral of users;
2. providing external users with 790 annual instrument days of Transnational access (TA) to the research environment of the core consortium of high level RIs in EU-NMR;
3. developing core technologies to increase the scope, application envelope and quality of access for RIs in bio-NMR.
Several activities were undertaken in order to establish NMR as an important tool for functional analysis of biological pathways and to integrate the available services. Firstly, a NMR workshop was held as a satellite meeting of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) congress in Prague, on 4 July 2009. A second workshop was organised with the Laboratoire de Résonance Magnétique Nucléaire (LRMN) in Grenoble, from 1 to 5 June 2009. Moreover, an integrated annual user meeting was held in conjunction with the networking activities of the East-NMR project, which was funded by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).
In addition, the project ensured spectrometer access to scientists for a much longer period of time than the initially planned. Thus, a broad application envelope was covered. Finally, the novel NMR methodology that was developed during the joint research activities was implemented at the distributed infrastructures offering TA, so that European NMR researchers directly benefited from the improved NMR methodology.