Researchers all over the world will have access to the University of Georgia’s expertise in nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR, thanks to a new infrastructure funded by a $40 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
The Network for Advanced Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, or NAN, will allow researchers to access ultra-high field nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers to study the structure, dynamics and interactions of biological systems and small molecules. The project is led by the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in partnership with UGA and the University of Wisconsin.
“This is much more than just a new expensive instrument—it’s an entirely different way of thinking about doing NMR,” said Art Edison, co-principal investigator and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. “Once we started to think in those terms, a lot of ideas emerged. For example, we want to create an easy way for scientists to discover what is available to them, even if they aren’t NMR experts themselves. We also realized that everyone has the same problems dealing with data: saving it, processing it, analyzing it and depositing it into public databases. Centralizing this would be much more efficient.”
Image: GRA Eminent Scholar Arthur Edison in the NMR Facility at the CCRC. (Photo by Andrew Davis Tucker/UGA)