2022

In a collaboration with Stefan Schütz and Wolfgang Jahnke from Novartis, the transcription factor MYC/MAX, which plays an important role in cancer, was studied. Have a look at the mechanisticc insights into DNA scanning and specific binding just published in JMB.

This semester the NMR seminar will deal with different methods for studying biomolecular interactions. We will cover of course NMR and we have invited several external speakers to introduce other methods like ITC, SPR and DSF, which allow addressing other aspects of biomolecular interactions.

ETH and the company Bruker where awarded the Chemical Landmark award by the Swiss academy of sciences. The long-standing public-private partnership of ETH and Bruker was honored, which had a decisive impact on the development of NMR.

This week the new probe at the 700 MHz instrument (sept) was installed. It has 1.4-fold higher senstivity on ¹H than the probe it replaces and it sports XYZ gradients. This is the first probe of this kind at the platform and we're very much looking forward to explore the possibilites this new probe offers.

We contributed an NMR analysis to a major research effort of the Sunagawa and Piel laboratories. In this work, the genomes of countless ocean microorganisms were mined and thereby the number of know genomic sequences was increased 2–3 fold. Tens of thousands of gene clusters were identified with predicted novel synthetic capabilities. Some of them were reproduced experimentally and the resulting products were confirmed by NMR.

1D DOTETH experiments released. We introduce a new set of ETH 1D pulsesequences and parametersets on our spectrometers. These experiments can be automatically set up, similar to the DOTALL experiment library. After automatic calibration of the high power pulses with HCN90, each of these experiments can be set up by running the macro xxx90 to set high power pulses followed by 'geteth' to perform all remaining calibrations. These will help with automation and efficient set up of measurements.

This Wednesday we had the chance to visit the company Bruker – the manufacturer of most of our NMR instruments. We had the chance to see essentially every step in manufacturing of magnets, as well as probe and console testing facilities. A big thank you to the people at Bruker who made this event possible!

Our collaboration with Manuela Hospenthal’s group was just published. The study reveals FimT as a novel DNA receptor crucial for the uptake of DNA during Bacterial Natural Transformation. Together, we were able to determine the structure of protein FimT from Legionella and characterize its interactions with DNA.