Final Activity Report Summary - BIOINORGANIC NMR (NMR in inorganic structural biology) Fellowships were provided to 20 young researchers and PhD students for a total of 216 person-months, as foreseen in the contract: 7 fellows received grants for at least one year and 13 fellows received grants for less than one year. Among the latter, 2 fellows received grants for 10 and 11 months. Four long term fellowships and two short term fellowships have been provided for allowing six fellows to participate to the Doctoral courses in Structural Biology organised at the Research Infrastructure. Other short term fellowships were provided to fellows demonstrating an enthusiastic approach toward the research activity that we proposed, in order to allow them to acquire successful complementary expertise with respect to their training. The request of training that we received in the whole period has been much larger than what we could offer due to the limited available funds.Young fellows have been trained while developing research in structural biology and providing access to the newest NMR methodologies. They were involved in the most promising forefront research topics developed at the Research Infrastucture. Attention has been focused on framing specific problems in a general context, in an integrated interdisciplinary approach. Research topics spanned from protein expression, structural and dynamics characterisation to the study of protein-protein interactions.The research work performed by the recruited fellows resulted in 23 papers already published in international peer reviewed journals, most of them of high impact factor. Three fellows already successfully discussed their PhD thesis in Structural Biology in Florence, one fellow will discuss it in September 2008 and another fellow in December 2009; most of the other recruited fellows have discussed or are expected to discuss their PhD thesis at their Home Institution.
