EUROCORES Science of Protein Production for Structural and Functional Analysis (EuroSCOPE)

This EUROCORES is being executed by the NWO-divisions CW/ACTS and ALW in close cooperation. In this EUROCORES the following 12 funding agencies cooperate: Austria, Belgium, Check Republic, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Slovakia, Sweden and the Netherlands.

Scientific goals: The programme intends to tackle the major stumbling blocks in the production of proteins for functional and structural analysis. The focus will be on the basic understanding of the mechanisms underlying protein production, targeting, folding and stability, which eventually may result in the improvement of existing and the design of new expression systems. The work should lead to a firm foundation for the rational engineering of strains for the production of complex proteins such as multi-domain eukaryotic proteins, integral membrane proteins and multi-enzyme complexes. Thus far, these complex systems are highly underrepresented in the protein structure databases, because they are difficult to overproduce in a functional form and in amounts suitable for functional and structural work.

The emphasis of the programme is on the science of all aspects of protein production to permit structural studies of complex systems to begin. The program will not fund projects that aim at scaling up of the processes or the setting up of protein factories for the production on demand, although such initiatives will benefit from basic knowledge of protein production as proposed here. In Phase II of the programme, the structural analysis of the complex protein systems will become more prominent as this is evidently the second major hurdle in the exploitation of the wealth of genomic information currently available.

Extra Information

The call is now closed and 3 projects with a total of 23 part-projects have been approved. Dutch researchers participate in 4 of these part-projects.

Criteria

No longer applicable.

Contacts

• Dhr. dr. Th. Bruhn (Programme co-ordinator EuroSCOPE)
  

no documentation available