News

Joint Research Project HLT10 - Metrology for biomolecular origin of disease (short name: BiOrigin) aims to provide a step change in the infrastructure of biomolecular metrology by consolidating advanced measurements and computation with know-how in bioengineering.

This will allow a much needed problem-solving focus of specialist measurements when tackling global health issues such as antimicrobial resistance and metastatic cancers. To help achieve this, the project set out to rationally exploit structure-function relationships in polypeptides (the building blocks of proteins) that underpin molecular origin of disease.

The project results have already been published in high impact interdisciplinary venues including Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, the Physical Review B (PRB) Condensed matter and materials physics and Methods, while the approaches employed, both experimental and computational, made highlights in the Royal Society of Chemistry book series, 'Amino acids, peptides and proteins', co-edited by the JRP-Partner NPL, and, most recently, in a Methods issue edited by the JRP Partner.
The issue, dedicated to the state-of-the-art tools and methods for cellular localisation and measurements, comprises contributions from the JRP-Consortium and stakeholders including an industrial perspective by GlaxoSmithKline.

Early societal and industry impacts of the work can be judged from the recent highlights of the project results in an industry-oriented magazine (Drug Discovery World) and general public publications (The Times). In the recognition of supporting young talent a "Young Author Prize" has been awarded to the project-associated Researcher from University of Edinburgh with a paper entitled 'Electronically coarse-grained molecular dynamics using quantum Drude oscillators' published in Molecular Physics.

More information on the EMRP project HLT10 BiOrigin is available on the EURAMET project page >>