PROJECT MANAGEMENT TEAM
Beatrice Vallone – Coordinator (Sapienza Università di Roma)
Alberto Boffi – Training Officer (MoLiRom)
Riccardo Carelli – Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation (Sapienza Consorzio Innovazione)
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS
Academic Supervisors
ESR (Early Stage Researchers)
Capacity of the Participating Organisations
General Description
The Vallone group focuses on the structural dynamics of heme proteins and work primarily with the time resolved X-ray diffraction and wide-angle x-ray scattering, spectroscopy and kinetics. They aim to determine the functional relevance of dynamics events and identify reaction intermediates. The group has contributed to crystallography and structure-function relationship of heme proteins.
Beatrice Vallone, PhD, full professor. Structural biology and structural dynamics methods.
Carmelinda Savino, PhD. Research associate, crystallisation and data-analysis.
Linda Celeste Montemiglio, PostDoc, Protein crystallography and kinetics measurements, SAXS.
Giacomo Parisi, PhD Student. P450 cytochromes and WAXS.
Antonella Scaglione, PhD Student, Protein crystallography and SAXS.
B. Vallone is coordinator of the CNR facility “Biocrystal Facility” (www.biocrystalfacility.it), the group is also equipped with continuous flow, rapid mixing, T-jump equipment and participates to projects with access to the time resolved beam line ID09B at ESRF.
General Description
The Neutze group focuses upon the structural biology of membrane proteins, working primarily with membrane protein crystallisation and X-ray diffraction. They are leading in the development and application of time-resolved structural methods to membrane proteins and are known for work using intermediate trapping, time-resolved diffraction and time-resolved WAXS.
Richard Neutze PhD, professor. Structural biology and structural dynamics methods. Coordinator & PhD supervisor ESR1.
Kristina Hedfalk, PhD, Docent.
Gergely Katona, PhD, Associate Professor. Membrane protein production, purification, crystallisation and data-analysis
Sebastian Westenhoff, PhD Assistant Professor. WAXS.
Membrane protein production, crystallisation, time-resolved diffraction and time-resolved WAXS. Infrastructure and facilities for cloning, production, purification, characterisation and crystallisation of membrane protein.
General Description
XtalConcepts GmbH is a spin-off company of the Universities of Hamburg and Lübeck funded in 2012. XtalConcepts offers extensive and unique experience in dynamic light scattering technologies and methods. The company is specialized in the design, development and manufacturing of systems for the production of protein crystals; handling, scoring as well as imaging of protein crystallization setups and protein solutions.
Annette Eckhardt, PhD, Managing Director
Karsten Dierks, PhD, Head of Research and Development
Arne Meyer, PhD, Leading Scientist Structural Biology
Academic Supervisor
Christian Betzel, PhD, professor. Institut für Biochemie und Molekularbiologie, Universität Hamburg.
Portfolio and facilities comprise particular advanced crystallization manipulation, applying the patented XtalController technology, pre-and post-crystallization screening facilities including automatic in-situ DLS (SpectroLight 600), cuvette DLS (SpectroSize 300) and flow through, advanced technologies like depolarized dynamic light scattering (DDLS), multichannel-DLS (UDLS) and space resolved DLS (ODLS). The company has fully equipped mechanical, optical and electronic laboratories.
General Description
Beamline ID9B provides intense x-ray pulses for time resolved experiments. The time resolution is most commonly obtained via pump-probe with short-pulse lasers triggering the sample. A new picosecond laser facility with an optical spectrometer should greatly facilitate future experiments. The beamline has high priority in the ESRF Upgrade Program (UPBL9b) and will double its user capacity from 2015. Four scientists, one technician and two shared engineers currently staff the beamline.
Prof Michael Wulff will coordinate the time resolved SR experiments in the consortium. The goal is to combine information from optical/optical and optical/x-ray experiments to get better data with higher resolution in space and in time. Real-time data processing during the experiment will help the user to optimise the experimental parameters.
ID9B provides laser and x-ray pulses for pump-probe experiments to 100-picosecond resolution. A chopper is used to isolate single pulses from suitable timing modes of the synchrotron. The x-ray optics provides three options: pink beam (3% bw), multilayer beam (1% bw) and crystal beam (0.01%). Reaction initiation is done with a picosecond or a nanosecond laser. The beamline has a high-speed Frelon camera and a 300 k Pilatus Detector. Finally an x-ray emission spectrometer is being commissioned which will allow taking electronic and structural data in parallel.
General Description
Prof Larsson’s group focuses on studying phase-transitions and shock waves in solid materials, in particular carbon materials such as graphite and amorphous carbon. We adapt X-ray methods such as Grazing incidence WAXS and Grazing-incidence diffraction to encompass the ultrafast time-domain. The group is developing a beamline (the Short Pulsed Facility) for ultrafast X-ray science at MAX IV and an electron diffraction set-up, which has advantages for studies of dilute samples and light elements.
Jörgen Larsson, PhD, professor (20 %). Photonics, ultrafast X-ray science.
Henrik Enquist, PhD (15%), Scientist at MAX IV laboratory. ultrafast X-ray science.
Pererik Andreasson, PhD (20 %). Post-doctoral researcher in time-resolved X-ray diffraction.
Anna Persson, PhD student (30 %). Time-resolved diffraction.
The group has key competences in ultrafast X-ray diffraction methodology, ultrafast laser technology and fast detectors. MAX IV will include a short-pulse facility providing sub-100 fs X-ray burst in the keV range.
General Description
The Chapman group focuses on pushing X-ray imaging beyond conventional resolution limits caused by radiation damage and technology. Short, intense X-ray pulses, from X-ray FEL sources, are used to out-run radiation damage processes. The interaction of these pulses with matter is studied, and methods of phase retrieval and coherent imaging are developed.
Henry Chapman, PhD, W3 professor. X-ray optics and imaging.
Anton Barty, PhD, Senior Scientist. Instrumentation and analysis.
Thomas White, PhD, Research Fellow. Data analysis.
Lorenzo Galli, PhD student diffraction theory and X-ray-matter interaction.
Dominik Oberthuer, PhD, postdoc nanocrystal characterisation and data analysis.
The group has key competence in X-ray optics, coherent imaging, and X-ray FEL instrumentation. The group utilizes a dedicated high-performance computer cluster for the analysis of over 20 million diffraction patterns recorded in initial LCLS experiments.
General Description
Molecular Links Rome (MoLiRom s.r.l.) is a spin-off Company of the “Sapienza” University of Rome. The mission of MoLiRom is focused on the development of advanced projects in the biosynthesis and production of protein based products including protein engineering based on random or site directed mutagenesis. The development of diagnostic and therapeutic nanodevices based on engineered recombinant proteins capable of recognizing specific tumor cell receptors is currently actively pursued. Protein on (silicon) chip technology for nanoscale Surface Plasmon Resonance measurements is currently ongoing.
Alessandra Bonamore, PhD, leading scientist at MOLIROM, molecular biology and protein engineering.
Alberto Boffi, MD, Chief Operating Officer at MOLIROM.
Pierpapolo Ceci, PhD, scientist at MoLiRom, expert in protein based nanocarriers for theranostic.
Academic Supervisor
Alberto Boffi, MD, full professor. Molecular Biology, Sapienza Università di Roma.
Recombinant protein production and expression, random and site-selected mutagenesis, protein immobilization on activated silicon surfaces. Facilities comprise a fully equipped molecular biology lab, a pilot scale purification station, AFM and SEM microscopy.
General Description
The Department of Physics has long standing tradition in light induced phenomena and time resolved photo crystallography. Marco Cammarata (ESR main supervisor) has developed time-resolved solution scattering to follow protein structural change in solution and has worked at the world first Hard X-ray beamline (XPP) at a Free Electron Laser (LCLS).
Marco Cammarata, PhD, CNRS researcher, former beamline scientist at LCLS and regular LCLS user
Eric Collet, PhD, Professor. Expert in Crystallography and photo crystallography (including time resolved)
Time-resolved diffraction and time-resolved WAXS. In-house diffractometer. Analysis of Bragg and diffuse scattering. In-house femtosecond optical spectroscopy laboratory.
General Description
Astrazeneca is a global, innovation-driven, integrated biopharmaceutical company. Our mission is to make a meaningful difference to patient health through great medicines that bring benefit for patients and add value for our stakeholders and society. We discover, develop, manufacture and market prescription medicines and our primary focus is on three important areas of healthcare:
- Cardiovascular and Metabolic disease (CVMD);
- Oncology;
- Respiratory, Inflammation and Autoimmunity (RIA).
We are also active in the Infection, Neuroscience and Gastrointestinal (ING) disease areas. Astrazeneca has more than 51,000 employees worldwide. We invest over $4 billion in R&D each year and have around 9,000 people in our R&D organization.
Margareta Ek, PhD, Associate Principal Scientist (20%).
Arjan Snijder, PhD, Associate Principle Scientist (10%) The Discovery Sciences department will engage actively in producing membrane proteins, biophysical characterization, crystallization and scattering and diffraction studies at synchrotron radiation sources.
Academic Supervisor
Gisela Brändén, PhD, Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Gothenburg.
The Discovery Sciences department in AstraZeneca has extensive experience in target protein production (soluble, secreted, membrane proteins, NHR, GPCRs, IC etc). The group is highly competent in membrane protein production, crystallization, biophysical characterization and screening. The infrastructure and facilities are state of the art, with probably the highest density of protein purification equipment in Europe.
General Description
The Prof Schertler’s group focuses on the structural biology of membrane proteins, particularly G protein coupled receptors. They use membrane protein crystallisation and X-ray diffraction. We are leading in the development of stabilized receptors trapping different states for structure determination. Pedrini’s group focuses on novel methods and algorithms for spectroscopic and scattering experiments at XFELs. They work closely with SwissFEL laser and machine scientists.
Gebhard Schertler, PhD, Professor. Structural biology methods.
Dmitry Veprintsev, PhD, Senior Scientist. Membrane protein production, purification and biophysical analysis. Ching Ju Tsai, PhD, postdoc. Membrane protein production, purification and crystallisation.
Bill Pedrini, PhD. Responsible, diffract-&-destroy ptychography & cross-correlation scattering.
Bruce Patterson, PhD, professor. Scientific coordinator of the SwissFEL project, PI for terahertz pump-source application development.
Valerie Panneels, PhD, Senior Scientist. Lab Manager.
Rafael Abela, PhD. Project leader for SwissFEL photonics.
Protein production and expression, random and site selected mutagenesis, protein immobilization on activated silicon surfaces. Facilities comprise a fully equipped molecular biology lab, a pilot scale purification station, AFM and SEM microscopy. Synchrotron radiation and X-ray free electron laser science and technology including X-ray beamline optics, experimental chambers and detectors. Access to the Swiss Light Source coherent X-ray scattering beamline (CSAXS) and 3 protein crystallography beamlines. In preparation for user operation of the SwissFEL hard X-ray laser in 2016, a 250 MeV test injector accelerator has been built and will be used for test experiments for XFEL seeding.
General Description
CSI is a company created by Sapienza University of Rome to support exploitation of research activities. CSI services are:
- Joint Labs: 17 multidisciplinary laboratories with private and public partners;
- Innovative spin-off enterprises: support to 20 new entrepreneurs;
- Technology Transfer: promote research exploitation by assistance to commercialization and licensing;
- National/Regional/EU funding opportunities: information, specialized organizational and managerial counseling, planning and technical assistance for the participation to calls.
Riccardo Carelli is CSI responsible for EU funding activities from 2007 and coordinates 5 FP7 projects and manages administration and finance of a FP7 project. From 2003 to 2013: consultant at the Ministry of University and Research as FP7 National coordinator and FP7 NCP for Legal and Administrative Issues. FP6 NCP for Legal and Financial Issues, for SME Specific Actions and for the ERA NET. From 1999 to 2002: Project Officer at the European Commission (Enterprise Directorate General – Innovation Directorate, responsible for 10 IRC, 6 RITTS and 2 IRE projects). From 1990 to 1999: Technology Transfer Office of the CNR. From 2003 to date: Trainer at 62 training courses focused on FP related issues.
Stefania Della Corte managed several LLP projects and worked in the leading team of NotchIT, an FP7 ITN Marie Curie. She is managing ECONANO (TEMPUS project), COST Action IC1103 and she is working in the leading team of APPLES.