Seminar on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and supercomputation in Barcelona

Around one hundred researchers working in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and biomolecular structures will be brought together on 12 and 13 March in Barcelona on the occasion of the BIO-NMR symposium. This event is promoted by the European project BIO-NMR, which involves the participation of the University of Barcelona (UB), the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) and the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona). The symposium will include leading international speakers, such as Charles L. Brooks (University of Michigan) and David Case (University of Rutgers), among others.

This event seeks to boost synergies between complementary technologies in the field of structural biology, namely NMR and supercomputation, which are well established in Spain thanks to, for example, singular facilities such as the NMR Laboratory at the UB and the supercomputer MareNostrum, located at the BSC-CNS, respectively.

The symposium is directed at users and researchers involved in work on biomolecular structure (proteins and DNA). In both cases, supercomputation plays a crucial role as an enormous computational capacity is required to simulate the movement of these structures in their natural environment. Only in this way can some diseases be unraveled and can new drug treatments be developed.

The scientific committee of the seminar comprises local and renowned international researchers, such as Miquel Pons (senior professor at the UB, principal investigator at IRB Barcelona and ex-president of the Specialized NMR Group (GERMN) of the Royal Society of Chemistry); Rolf. Boelens (director of the NMR group at the Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research, adhered to the University of Utrech), and Modesto Orozco (director of Life Sciences at the BSC-CNS, principal investigator at IRB Barcelona and senior professor at the UB), among others.