To study the components of a cell, from proteins to organelles, scientists need a barrage of high-end equipment that no one laboratory can afford. Researchers typically access the tools they don’t have at collaborating labs or national centres. But with the launch of the Instruct network on 23 February, structural biologists across Europe have teamed up to make this sharing more systematic.

Instruct links up 22 structural-biology centres, allowing researchers to access a range of equipment and expertise in a single request, says Instruct’s head David Stuart, a structural biologist at the University of Oxford, UK.

It also presents an opportunity for structural biologists to solicit funding with a unified voice — just in time for Horizon 2020, the European Commission’s next research-funding programme, which is gearing up to disburse an anticipated €80 billion (US$108 billion) in grants between 2014 and 2020.

Instruct emerged from Europe-wide projects that determined the crystal structures of hundreds of proteins and protein complexes. Stuart says that the project will now try to fill in details of the cell at every scale in a way that he likens to zooming towards a location using Google Earth. “The idea is to have a ‘Google Cell’ approach, so you can drill from the cellular context to the atomic detail,” he says.

For instance, a scientist studying herpes infection might start by looking at fluorescent viruses under a light microscope. Switching to electron microscopy would reveal the subcellular compartments that the virus exploits. A crystal structure of a key molecular interaction might help to identify infection-blocking drugs.

“Only doing crystallography is not enough. Only doing electron microscopy is not enough. You often need all these technologies, and it’s very hard to have them all in one house,” says Albert Heck, scientific director of the Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, which will offer mass spectrometry through Instruct.

Credit: Source: Instruct

Each of Instruct’s facilities will cede up to 20% of their capacity to the programme (see ‘Share the wealth’). Instruct will seek independent peer review of requests for equipment use and will approve access to various facilities, in some cases bypassing the allocation committees at individual centres.

The programme is initially using a subscription model, with eight nations, including Britain, France and Germany, agreeing to pay €50,000 per year to give their scientists access. Currently, the European Commission provides funding only for researchers to travel to these facilities. But Heck hopes that if Instruct is successful, Horizon 2020 will support both access and infrastructure for structural-biology centres, including equipment and staff, removing the need for subscriptions.

Aled Edwards, a structural biologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, is well used to juggling international resources as head of the Structural Genomics Consortium, which has solved more than 1,000 protein structures. He thinks Instruct makes sense. “It gives people access to technologies they don’t have locally, it trains people,” he says. “It’s clearly setting itself up for Horizon 2020 funding. But they deserve it, if they can pull it off.”

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