General Information
The EMBL Hamburg Unit is part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) with the main laboratory located in Heidelberg and research units in Hamburg, Grenoble, Hinxton (Cambridge) and Monterotondo (Rome). Activities at EMBL Hamburg focus on state-of-the-art structural biology methods using synchrotron radiation. The unit is situated on campus of the German Synchrotron Research Centre (DESY). DESY hosts leading facilities for synchrotron radiation (DORIS-III, in operation; PETRA-III, under construction, user operation planned for 2010) and electron lasers (VUV-FEL, commissioned; X-FEL, planned).
At present, EMBL Hamburg operates seven experimental stations using synchrotron radiation from the DORIS-III ring. Six of these stations are for applications in Macromolecular Crystallography (MX); three of them are energy-tuneable, two of the MX end stations are equipped with automatic sample changers. The other experimental station are for applications in Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS) of biological material. In addition, the EMBL Hamburg Unit has set up a biochemistry laboratory hosting a pipeline for sample preparation and characterisation. This includes facilities for high-density cell fermentation, semi-automated protein purification and mass spectrometry. In addition to existing facilities, a High-Throughput Crystallisation Facility with a capacity for 10,000 trays was opened to the research community in 2006. The facilities are available to the research community based on scientific criteria.
Research at the EMBL Hamburg Unit is tightly associated with the available synchrotron experiment stations for applications in life sciences. Several projects are aiming to develop novel technologies to advance methods in structural biology in terms of automation and user friendliness. In addition, faculty members from Hamburg lead a number of research projects to meet grant challenges in structural biology. They include activities on viral replication, transcription factor and regulator complexes, protein kinases, translocation receptors, amino acid biosynthesis pathways. EMBL Hamburg coordinates an integrated structural proteomics project on targets from Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
For further information: info@embl-hamburg.de.