Research
The CFNMR centre supports research in a number of areas both within the college and externally. At Imperial College the majority of research falls in three main areas: Structural Biology (mainly applying solution-state NMR), Biomolecular Medicine (both solution and solid-state) and Solid State NMR applications in materials and biomembranes.
Research Themes
Structural Biology
The CFNMR centre provides access to the high-field NMR instrumentation necessary for the world-class research being undertaken at Imperial College in the field of structural biology. The CFNMR is associated with the multi-disciplinary Centre for Structural Biology (CSB) whose NMR application is led by the groups of Professor Steve Matthews, Dr Ernesto Cota-Segura, and Dr Theodoros Karamanos. Within the diverse range of research activities underway at the CSB, NMR has made especially important contributions in the understanding of various host-pathogen interactions at the molecular level, eukaryotic/viral translation initiation, chaperone function, in elucidating the mechanism of amyloid formation and in characterising intrinsically disordered proteins in water and at the surface of biological membranes.
Microbial Metabonomics
The high capacity SampleJet with air cooling on our 800MHz NMR spectrometer greatly facilitated metabonomics researches by Dr Julie McDonald whose projects often involves measurements of hundreds of samples.