Methods
Our institute uses a wide range of biochemical, cell culture and molecular biological techniques to clone, overexpress, purify and characterize biological samples with the ultimate goal of investigating their structure and function using biophysical methods. Data acquisition for our cryo-electron tomography and cryo-electron microscopy single-particle reconstruction work is performed at the The Scientific Center for Optical and Electron Microscopy (ScopeM) of the ETH Zurich. The facility is equipped with three Titan Krios cryo-electron microscopes and two cryo-focused ion beam instruments. Apart from our in-house x-ray diffractometer to characterize macromolecular crystals, high-quality diffraction data is collected at the latest generation Swiss Light Source (SLS) synchrotron at the Paul-Scherrer Institute, about 40 minutes from our institute in Villigen. NMR spectroscopy is performed at the NMR facility of ETH Zurich in our institute, harboring amongst others a 900 MHz Bruker NMR magnet. Within the institute we are also investigating molecular structure, dynamics and biochemical reaction kinetics using stop-flow absorption/transmission spectrophotometry, circular dichroism, fluorescence resonance energy transfer, fluorescence anisotropy or light scattering measurements.
The Biomolecular NMR Spectroscopy Platform (BNSP) is a scientific technology platform of the Department of Biology (D-BIOL) at the ETH Zürich. The BNSP serves the advancement and coordination of research and teaching in the area of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. BNSP provides the researchers of the D-BIOL and the ETH with access to know-how, technology, and state-of-the-art infrastructure for the study of proteins or biological complexes in solution using the latest NMR techniques.
The Scientific Center for Optical and Electron Microscopy (ScopeM) is a central scientific technology platform of ETH Zurich providing resources and services in light and electron microscopy (and related areas) as well as direct access to state-of-the-art microscopy and sample preparation equipment.
The CryoEM Knowledge Hub (CEMK) supports ETH investigators to conduct tomography and single particle cryoEM experiments in a collaborative fashion.
The external page Swiss Light Source (SLS) at the Paul Scherrer Institut is a third-generation synchrotron light source. With an energy of 2.4 GeV, it provides photon beams of high brightness for research in materials science, biology and chemistry.