Structural biology

The evolution of the facility, in the context of the ESRF upgrade, is encompassed within UPBL10/MASSIF.  This facility, to be located at beamlines ID30 and BM29, will have at its core three beamlines optimised for highly automated, high-throughput sample evaluation.

Many of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies carry out proprietary research on our beamlines developing future drug candidates.  Industrial clients can access our facilities through our mail-in crystallography service MXpress or by applying directly for beamtime.  See the Industry website for details.

In-house research runs in parallel to beamline operation, helping us to perfect techniques while investigating key scientific areas. Current projects include:

• Beamline instrumentation (Kappa gonimeters, dehydration devices, sample characterisation)
• The molecular basis of the extreme radiation resistance of Deinococcus radiodurans
• Structural studies of enzymatic transition states
• Activation mechanisms of LysR transcription regulators.

Additional details are in our Research & Development and Research Profiles pages.

A number of laboratories and facilities are available to the community. Of particular interest is The Partnership for Structural Biology (PSB) which is a collaboration between ESRF, EMBL, ILL and IBS to bring together a set of complementary technologies for structural biology.

• The Partnership for Structural Biology
• Cryo-Bench Laboratory
• High Pressure Freezing Laboratory

• ID13
• BM16
• BM26
• BM30A