NEWS AND UPDATES

Happy New Year! May 2025 be full of new opportunities and New Major and Radiant (NMR) ideas! Cheers to a successful year!

As the current Connect NMR UK supporting fund finishes on the 31st January 2025, you will be glad to hear we are planning to submit a new application to EPSRC for a Connect NMR V2.0 national network.

Please let us know your thoughts and ideas about the network. All comments and discussions are welcome and will be most helpful to design a meaningful proposal and continue our work towards an engaging and growing NMR UK community. Here are our contacts:

 

Training Mobility Grant – The current Connect NMR UK funding will only support applications for events up to the 31st January 2025.

Save the date for the 6th Reaction Monitoring Symposium – 28 January 2025 at the University of Bath. You can apply for the Training Mobility Grant from the Connect NMR to attend this meeting. Find out more here.

Closing the 2024 NMR year: In December the Connect NMR UK supported the SNUG Postgraduate NMR Meeting 2024 and the NMRDG/BRSG Winter meeting.

Giulia Bonasegale said her trip to Edinburgh to attend the SNUG PG Meeting 2024 was “an enriching journey that broadened my knowledge of NMR”. Here is how she has described the meeting: “Organised over two days, it offered a series of lectures by experts in the field from all over Scotland, ranging from the basic principles of liquid and solid NMR to some of the latest techniques and practical applications. We then had the opportunity to take part in a guided workshop to learn how to use a new NMR data processing software called NMRium, a useful tool for structure determination. I appreciated that some of the lectures focused on the application of NMR in the biological field, especially in the study of proteins and ligand-protein interactions, as this is directly related to my PhD project. I think that the knowledge gained will be very helpful: it has provided me with more tools to achieve the goal of developing molecular glues for IDP protein targeting.”

Ian Cahuzac attended the NMRDG/BRSG Winter Meeting at the Royal Society of Chemistry in the beautiful Burlington House and here what he said: “It was a great opportunity to discover the breadth of NMR research currently being performed both in the UK and abroad. I thoroughly enjoyed all the presentations. Professor Sharon Ashbrook’s work on the investigation of disorder in phosphate frameworks was of particular interest.”


RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS

The study Spectroscopic, biochemical, and computational studies of bioactive DNA minor groove binders targeting 5′-WGWWCW-3′ motifled by Prof Parkinson in collaboration with Prof Hasan Y. Alniss explores the design and interaction of specific compounds with the DNA minor groove, focusing on sequences characterized by the 5′-WGWWCW-3′ motif (W represents A or T, G is guanine, and C is cytosine). Using a combination of NMR analysis, biochemical assays, and computational modelling, the researchers identify how these compounds selectively bind to the DNA minor groove, stabilize the double helix, and alter its biological properties. The study emphasizes the structural and functional specificity of these interactions, advancing our understanding of DNA recognition by small molecules. This has implications for developing targeted therapeutics, especially for diseases where specific DNA sequences play a critical regulatory role.

The multidisciplinary approach, which integrates experimental and computational tools was paramount to elucidate the mechanism of minor groove binding. By demonstrating the ability of these compounds to selectively interact with specific DNA motifs, the work paves the way for designing precision drugs with reduced off-target effects. These insights could contribute to the development of novel anticancer agents, antivirals, and other therapeutics targeting gene expression at the DNA level.

Alniss HY et al., Bioorg Chem 2024; 148:107414. doi: 10.1016/j.bioorg.2024.107414.

 

The paper Protein NMR assignment by isotope pattern recognition is the result of a multidisciplinary international effort led by Prof Ilya Kuprov at the University of Southampton and Weizmann Institute and Prof Hari Arthanari at the Harvard University. It introduces a novel approach for assigning nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra of proteins using isotope pattern recognition. This method leverages the distinct isotope patterns of labelled proteins to automate the process of identifying specific atomic nuclei within complex NMR datasets. By combining experimental data with computational tools, the approach streamlines the assignment process, which is traditionally labour-intensive and a critical bottleneck in structural biology. The study demonstrates the effectiveness of this method in improving the accuracy and efficiency of protein NMR assignments, even for large and complex biomolecules.

The impact of this work lies in its potential to revolutionize protein NMR spectroscopy by significantly reducing the time and expertise required for assignments. This advancement enables researchers to more easily investigate protein structures, dynamics, and interactions, which are essential for understanding biological processes and designing therapeutics. The method’s automation and scalability make it a valuable tool for studying challenging systems, such as membrane proteins or intrinsically disordered proteins, thus broadening the scope of NMR in structural biology and drug discovery.

Rasulov U et al. 2024 Sci Adv. 10(36):eado0403. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.ado0403


UPCOMING EVENTS

6th Reaction Monitoring Symposium – 28 January 2025 9:30-5:00 at the University of Bath

Solid-state-NMR-workshop-2025 – 18th March 2025 at Millburn House, University of Warwick

UK High-Field Solid-State NMR Facility Annual Symposium – 19th March 2025, in person (at the University of Warwick, Scarman conference centre) and on-line

Frontiers of Magnetic Resonance / NMR Discussion Group Spring Meeting – 31 March 2025 10:00 to 1 April 2025 11:00 at Southampton , UK

Experimental Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Conference – JOINT ENC – ISMAR CONFERENCE – 6-10 April 2025 at the Asilomar Conference Center, 800 Asilomar Blvd, Pacific Grove, CA 93950

PANIC – Practical Applications of NMR in Industry Conference – 19-22 May 2025 at Rockville, Maryland at the Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research (IBBR) Campus

Workshop – Paramagnetic NMR & DNP enhanced solid-state NMR – 19 – 23 May 2025 at the CRMN, Lyon.

EuroMAR2025 – 6-10 July 2025 at Oulu, Finland

2025 Alpine Conference on Magnetic Resonance in Solids – 14-18 September 2025 at Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, France


FEATURED FACILITY

The Dynamic Reaction Monitoring (DReaM) Facility at the University of Bath is hosting 6th Reaction Monitoring Symposium kicking of the 2025 NMR events in the NMR community. We have asked Catherine Lyall to tell us a bit about this facility:

“The Dynamic Reaction Monitoring (DReaM) Facility  was set up at the University of Bath in 2017, after receiving an EPSRC Strategic Equipment grant in 2016. We study homogeneous solution-state chemical reactions and processes via flow NMR (and other analytical techniques), specialising in elucidating reaction mechanisms. We are proud that several of the alumni who have undertaken postgraduate research in the DReaM Facility have gone on to start careers as NMR spectroscopists. 

Over the past eight years, we have had academic and industrial users come from across the UK and Europe, both to use the Facility and to collaborate with us – some of these collaborations have come to fruition via conversations held at our Reaction Monitoring Symposia, so do consider joining us on the 28th January 2025 if you’d like to network. 

Recently, we were pleased to host some workshops as part of the 2024 UK Bruker Users’ Meeting, where attendees joined us in the DReaM Facility lab for a reaction monitoring demonstration and the chance to discuss their own reaction monitoring techniques and set ups. Bruker were also able to showcase the new solid-state NMR capabilities we have recently had installed on one of our other NMR spectrometers to the attendees.”