News

First dataset acquired at the Polish Cryo-EM Centre at Solaris

Location
Krakow - Poland

The heart of the National Cryo-Em Centre, which is being developed at the Polish CERIC partner facility SOLARIS, will be Titan Krio G3i, the latest generation of a cryo-electron microscope.

After successful assembly of the microscope and preliminary tests, an engineer from Thermo Scientific came from Eindhoven NanoPort to acquire SPA test data set of standard reference sample i.e. apoferritin. The data will be sent to the Netherlands for analysis and 3D structure reconstruction. If results are satisfying, the National Cryo-EM Facility will be almost ready to operate.

The consortium operates under the direction of Dr Sebastian Glatt (Małopolska Centre of Biotechnology of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków) and Dr. Marcin Nowotny (International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw).

The creation of the Centre will allow researchers to join the community of global leaders in structural biology.

The components of the cryo-microscope arrived at the SOLARIS Centre just before the end of 2018. Following installation, calibration and optimization of the device, the cryo-microscope will be available to its first users in Autumn 2019. Users can request to access the cryo-EM at Solaris already in the currently open CERIC call for proposals. 

The Structural Biology Core Facility at Małopolska Centre of Biotechnology will provide support in the preparation of samples.

The project is financed by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education.