The completion of the world's largest nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) facility at the campus of the RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center in Yokohama is an important step forward for Japan's structural genomics programme. NMR spectroscopy is a potential rival to synchrotron radiation in protein-structure analysis and, with RIKEN's new facility, Japanese scientists hope to play a key role in developing new instrumentation tools for structural genomics. Initially, the new facility will have 16 machines, and this number is expected to increase to 200 at its completion in 2002. Among others, the facility will host the world's most powerful NMR device.

Although some scientists are sceptical about whether NMR spectroscopy will ever replace crystallography as a research tool in structural biology, others argue that much could be done to improve NMR techniques, and that experimental performance could surge with the availability of new, more powerful instruments.

Yoshiyuki Yokoyama, who is responsible for RIKEN's structural genomics effort, believes that X-ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy have their perspective advantages and that combining both techniques is likely to be the most beneficial strategy. “X-ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy are complementary technologies,” he says.