At the Core

"Structural Biology is a scientific area in which Israeli scientists have been leading for many years, as evidenced by the Weizmann Institute's Prof. Ada Yonath, who won a Nobel Prize in 2009 for her pioneering work on solving the structure of ribosomes," says the Institute's Prof. Joel Sussman, Director of Israel’s Instruct Core Centre.

This Centre, which is operated jointly with Tel Aviv University, is one of seven Core Centres recently founded in prestigious institutions, mainly in Europe. They are a part of Instruct (Integrated Structural Biology Infrastructure), which aims to give pan-European users access to state-of-the-art equipment, technologies and manpower in cellular structural biology. This will enable Europe to maintain a competitive edge and play a leading role in this vital research area.

Central to the decision to locate the Instruct Core Centre in Israel is the Israel Structural Proteomics Center (ISPC) established by scientists from the Weizmann Institute, with Sussman as its director, to increase the efficiency of protein structure determination.

The founding agreement, signed in February at a ceremony in Brussels, will mean that "Israeli scientists and their European counterparts will now have access to facilities they could only have dreamed of before," says the Weizmann Institute’s Prof. Gideon Schreiber, Deputy Director of Israel's Instruct Core Centre as well as of the ISPC. "We hope this core centre will stimulate new collaborative research projects between laboratories throughout Europe with the Weizmann Institute as well as with other Israeli institutions, and also attract more graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and visiting scientists from all over the world."

 

Prof. Joel Sussman's research is supported by Mr. and Mrs. Yossie Hollander, Israel; the Jean and Jula Goldwurm Memorial Foundation; the Samuel Aba and Sisel Klurman Foundation; the Bruce H. and Rosalie N. Rosen Family Foundation; Mr. and Mrs. Howard Garoon, Glencoe, IL; and the Nalvyco Trust. Prof. Joel Sussman is the incumbent of the Morton and Gladys Pickman Professorial Chair in Structural Biology.