The Josef Dadok National NMR Centre is one of the core facilities of the Structural Biology research programme with its focus on the key technology of NMR spectroscopy. Currently this top-class workplace has the use of six NMR spectrometers in total, with the most powerful NMR spectrometer working at a frequency of 950 MHz. It is an almost unique device – there are only eight of them around the world, four of which are in Europe. NMR spectroscopy deals with detailed studies of biomolecule structure and how it changes over time on an atomic level. Using this method contributes to a detailed description and explanation of a wide range of biologically interesting processes – from the regulation of the transcription of genetic information up to processes at a cellular level. Detailed knowledge of the structure of proteins and nucleic acids also helps in the pharmaceutical industry in the design of new drugs.
The new CEITEC workplace will significantly strengthen the position of the research programme Structural Biology in a European Context. The NMR laboratory is already involved in important European projects in the area of structural biology, such as Bio-NMR or INSTRUCT, and actively contributes to the development of new methods in nuclear magnetic resonance. Thanks to grants provided to CEITEC, in the coming years researchers in the Structural Biology programme will install other unique devices for X-ray crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy and tomography, which will help to study comprehensively biomolecular structures and interactions.
The National NMR Centre carries the name of Josef Dadok, an excellent Czech scientist and innovator. Josef Dadok graduated from BUT in the early 50s. In the late 50s and early 60s he developed the first devices for NMR spectroscopy in the Institute of Scientific Instruments, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, and they were put into its production programme by Tesla Brno from 1965. Thus Czechoslovakia became the third developed country, after the USA and Japan, to succeed in the serial production of these scientific devices. In 1967 Professor Dadok left for an internship in the USA and he did not return after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. In 1976 he became Technical Director of the Pittsburgh National Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Centre and full professor for chemical scientific instruments at the Carnegie Mellon University. In 1977 he completed the development of the first superconducting spectrometer, with a field strength of 14.1 T and a working frequency of 600 MHz, which remained the most powerful system for high-resolution spectroscopy in the world for eight long years.
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