Major investment to establish an innovative research-community driven infrastructure for molecular biology
Professor Geerten W. Vuister
Five years on from the COVID-19 pandemic, there remains a vital need for further research into preventing disease with the development of new drugs and technologies, so that people live longer and healthier lives.
The Universities of Sheffield, Southampton, Leicester, Leeds and the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Computational Science Centre for Research Communities (CoSeC) will collaborate on a community driven project to establish the 'Digital Research Infrastructure for Integrative Molecular Biology' (DRI-IMB, pronounced ‘dream’).
The partners involved in DRI-IMB, an £870,000 project enabled through CoSeC’s Bridging Funding initiative, seeks to create a strong foundation for understanding the dynamics and flexibility of biomolecules by complementing experimental techniques with computer simulations.
While predictive tools, such as AlphaFold, can now routinely provide static structures of many (but not all) proteins, without an essential understanding of dynamics, we cannot grasp how these proteins perform their biological function. Understanding dynamics is the next vital step for biomolecular scientists to develop new treatments for disease.
The project brings together the expertise of four established Collaborative Computational Project (CCP) communities together with support from STFC for all CCPs led by Dr Martyn Winn:
• CCPBioSim: Biomolecular simulations, led by Professor Sarah Harris (Sheffield)
• CCP4: Macromolecular crystallography, led by Professor Ivo Tews (Southampton)
• CCPN: Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy of biomolecules, led by Professor Geerten W. Vuister (Leicester)
• CCP-EM: Electron microscopy data processing, led by Professor Neil Ranson (Leeds).
Together, this new collaboration will focus on advancing technologies and aim to improve data sharing, identify gaps in research tools and techniques, provide training and skill development and share best practices in data and AI.
Professor Harris said: "Knowing how biomolecules move is essential to understanding how they perform their functions and is the next big challenge in structural molecular biology. Such biological questions can only be addressed by collaborative teams combining all their expertise together to form an integrated picture and combining new computational tools with state-of-the-art experimental capabilities. DRI-IMB is all about strengthening our connectivity and interactions both in the UK and internationally, for everyone in biosciences.
DRI-IMB underscores CoSeC’s commitment to innovation through collaboration, setting the stage for a more interconnected biosciences research landscape in the UK.
Dr Stephen Longshaw, Director of CoSeC said: “The CoSeC Bridging Funding initiative was designed to foster development of existing collaborative communities, so I am excited to see DRI-IMB uniting multiple communities into a single, cohesive collaboration. The funding itself, delivered by STFC, is provided through the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure programme, which places huge importance on research software and the skills that it demands. I believe that the DRIIMB project will deliver a step-change in computational research capability for the biological community and I’m looking forward to seeing what this collaboration with CoSeC’s team of Research Technical Professionals will achieve.”
Professor Vuister, from the University of Leicester's Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, added: “I am very excited to work with the other CCPs in the DRIIMB consortium because of the huge potential it brings together through the team’s specialised skills in experimental techniques and molecular modelling, giving us the opportunity to transform ideas into actual tools for research. This is the start of sustained support for the development of crucial digital research infrastructure across the UK."