Oncode’s Equipment and Infrastructure programme aims to support the research community by enabling joint equipment- and infrastructure-based projects between different institutes. These can include the purchase of larger equipment, access to new technologies and the implementation of infrastructures which are available for the wider Oncode research community.
With the first call within this programme, existing facilities of Oncode labs were strengthened. A total of 10 projects at 6 different institutes were funded (see figure below). The second call focused on initiatives that show a need from several Oncode Investigators across multiple institutes and that focus on strengthening the scientific capabilities of the Oncode community as a whole.
One of these approved proposals of the first call came from Oncode Investigators Titia Sixma and Anastassis Perrakis (NKI). Thanks to this call and funding from other sources, they could fund an Electron Microscopy (EM) Facility at the NKI.
Titia Sixma says: “This type of facility is an absolute necessity for our research and we are pleased that we are able to open it up for the Oncode community. Electron microscopy has been around for 30 years, but only in the last four or five years it has become a really exciting technique for studying the structure of macromolecules at atomic resolution. While in crystallography we typically trap a single complex or state, single particle cryo-EM allows to see multiple states or sub-complexes, in the same picture!”
Tassos Perrakis adds: “The EM facility itself is not unique, it’s the combination of multiple components that we offer at the NKI that makes it so interesting for the Oncode community. We have vast experience in protein expression, biophysical characterization, and X-ray crystallography, including ligand and fragment-based lead discovery. The addition of the cryo-EM facility gives us a unique combination of expertise that can really benefit researchers within Oncode, for basic research and drug discovery projects.”
Titia and Tassos are already collaborating with many researchers from other Oncode institutes and are looking forward to setting up new collaborations in their facility.
Tassos concludes: “We are very proud of this high-class facility, which is part of the Instruct and iNEXT-Discovery consortia. We are also excited that very recently Oncode accepted our proposal, together with other Oncode Investigators, to build a GPU-computing facility for AI applications. Machine learning and GPU-computing are essential for the analysis of single particle cryo-EM data, and we are very please with this development. Please contact us if you’d like more information on how to use the EM facility or any other facilities that we have.”
Titia and Tassos will host an Oncode Masterclass on Macromolecular Structures in Cancer Research on November 25th at the NKI, which will also include information and a lab tour of the EM facility. After the Masterclass, the EM facility will have an opening celebration with drinks. All Oncode researchers are invited to join, please find more info and register via this link.