Multi-user Equipment at the University of Leeds

该奖项提供多用户设备，以支持利兹大学的工程和物理科学研究。具体地说，该设备支持布拉格材料研究中心和利兹的阿斯特伯里结构分子生物学中心内的主要跨学科研究。布拉格材料研究中心的建立是为了汇集在原子和分子水平上设计的材料的发现、创造、表征和开发方面的跨校园专业知识。它将提供新的设备和系统来应对21世纪的挑战，例如医疗诊断、通信、电池技术和传感器。它将被安置在威廉·亨利·布拉格爵士大楼内，这是来自大学的9600万英镑的资本投资。阿斯特伯里结构分子生物学中心聚集了物理科学、工程学、生物学和医学的研究人员，目标是了解分子细节的生命。例如，与这一呼吁相关的是，研究人员正在开发工具和技术，以了解与癌症相关的酶(激酶)如何与其他蛋白质相互作用，我们的细胞内如何管理活性氧物种，错误如何导致疾病，以及我们如何通过化学模拟自然的进化过程来开发新的治疗分子，如抗生素。这些仪器将提供新的或增强的能力，使研究人员能够准备、表征和操作分子、超分子组装和复杂复合材料，提供新的见解，将导致有影响力的研究成果，例如通过在国际公认的期刊上发表。它们还将使我们能够更广泛地与工业伙伴合作，解决与商业相关领域的现有问题，并推动利兹研究产生的新技术的采用，创造新的产品和工艺。四项具体的设备是：1)用于原位电子显微镜的微操作器：利兹是英国领先的电子显微镜中心。显微操纵器是一种多功能工具，可以安装在现有的电子显微镜上，并允许实时研究材料在受力或以亚微米精度压入时发生的情况。通过添加低温(冷)平台，可以研究乳剂和生物材料。2)物理科学的分子分离/纯化：高效液相色谱(HPLC)允许从复杂混合物中分离分子物种，这在研究与生物相关的分子(天然、合成或半合成)等方面至关重要。3)粒子、大分子和生物物理科学的流动场-流动分离：不对称流动场-流动分离是一种色谱技术，它允许基于尺寸的表征和纯化超出分子尺度(纳米到微米)的物质，例如纳米颗粒、脂囊和蛋白质等生物分子的复合体。这一点至关重要，因为这些物种/组件的性质通常会随着大小的不同而急剧变化。4)软物质和生物物理流变仪：流变学是研究软材料的性质如何随着外力的变化而变化的科学。这对于研究生物分子的行为是必不可少的，例如用于诊断和治疗应用的改性生物分子、新的功能凝胶、用于显示器和传感器的液晶材料以及食品中的胶体材料。

The award delivers multi-user equipment to support research across engineering and physical sciences at the University of Leeds. Specifically, the equipment underpins major cross-disciplinary research within the Bragg Centre for Materials Research and the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology at Leeds.The Bragg Centre for Materials Research has been established to bring together cross-campus expertise in the discovery, creation, characterization and exploitation of materials engineered at the atomic and molecular level. It will provide new devices and systems to meet 21st century challenges in, for example, medical diagnostics, communications, battery technologies and sensors. It will be housed within the Sir William Henry Bragg building, a £96M capital investment from the University.The Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology brings together researchers in physical sciences, engineering, biology and medicine with the goal of understanding life in molecular detail. Relevant to this call, for example, researchers are developing tools and techniques to understand how cancer-related enzymes (kinases) interact with other proteins, how reactive oxygen species are managed within our cells and how mistakes can lead to disease, and how we can chemically mimic nature's evolution processes to develop new therapeutic molecules such as antibiotics.The instruments will provide new or enhanced capabilities that will enable researchers to prepare, characterise and manipulate molecules, supramolecular assemblies and complex composites, delivering new insights which will lead to impactful research outcomes, disseminated for example through publication in internationally-recognised journals. They will also allow us to collaborate more widely with industrial partners to solve existing problems in commercially-relevant areas and to drive the uptake of new technologies arising from research at Leeds, creating new products and processes.The four specific items of equipment are:1) Micromanipulators for In Situ Electron Microscopy: Leeds is a leading centre for electron microscopy in the UK. The micromanipulator is a versatile tool that can be attached to existing electron microscopes and allows the real-time study of what happens to materials when they are e.g. placed under force or indented with sub-micrometre precision. The addition of a cryogenic (cold) platform allows the study of emulsions and biological materials.2) Molecular Separation/Purification for Physical Sciences: high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) allows the separation of molecular species from complex mixtures and is vital in, for example, the study of biologically-relevant molecules (natural, synthetic or semi-synthetic). An analytical HPLC instrument will allow the characterisation of complex mixtures while the preparative HPLC uses mass-spectrometry to facilitate the automated purification of desired molecules from the mixtures.3) Flow Field-Flow Fractionation for Particulate, Macromolecular and Biophysical Sciences: asymmetric flow field-flow fractionation is a chromatographic technique that allows the size-based characterisation and purification of materials beyond the molecular scale (nanometer to micrometer) such as nanoparticles, supramolecular assemblies such as lipid vesicles and complexes of biomolecules such as proteins. This is vital, since the properties of these species/assemblies often vary critically and dramatically with size.4) Rheometer for Soft Matter and Biological Physics: rheometry is the study of how properties of soft materials change in response to applied forces. This is essential to applications such as studying the behaviour of biomolecules such as modified biomolecules for diagnostic and therapeutic applications, new functional gels, liquid crystalline materials for displays and sensors, and colloidal materials within foods.