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。具体来说，该设备支持了利兹布拉格材料研究中心和阿斯特伯里结构分子生物学中心的主要跨学科研究。布拉格材料研究中心的成立是为了在原子和分子水平的材料工程的发现、创造、表征和开发方面汇集跨校园的专业知识。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，该大楼是该大学投资9600万英镑建造的。阿斯特伯里结构分子生物学中心汇集了物理科学、工程、生物学和医学领域的研究人员，目的是了解生命的分子细节。例如，与这一呼吁相关的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，我们细胞内的活性氧是如何管理的，错误是如何导致疾病的，以及我们如何通过化学方法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，使研究人员能够制备、表征和操纵分子、超分子组装和复杂的复合材料，提供新的见解，这些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而传播。它们还将使我们能够与工业伙伴进行更广泛的合作，以解决商业相关领域的现有问题，并推动利兹大学研究产生的新技术的采用，创造新的产品和工艺。四项具体设备是：1)原位电子显微镜显微操作器：利兹是英国领先的电子显微镜中心。微操纵器是一种多功能工具，可以连接到现有的电子显微镜上，并允许实时研究当材料受到外力或以亚微米精度压痕时发生的情况。添加的低温（冷）平台允许乳剂和生物材料的研究。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种类，并且在例如生物相关分子（天然，合成或半合成）的研究中至关重要。分析型高效液相色谱仪器将允许表征复杂混合物，而制备型高效液相色谱使用质谱法促进从混合物中自动纯化所需分子。3)颗粒、大分子和生物物理科学的流场-流分馏法：不对称流场-流分馏法是一种色谱技术，它允许对分子尺度（纳米到微米）以外的材料进行基于尺寸的表征和纯化，如纳米颗粒、超分子组装如脂质囊泡和生物分子复合物如蛋白质。这是至关重要的，因为这些物种/组件的特性通常随着尺寸的变化而急剧变化。4)软物质和生物物理流变仪：流变学研究的是软材料的性质如何随着外力的变化而变化。这对于研究生物分子的行为（如用于诊断和治疗应用的改性生物分子）、新型功能凝胶、用于显示器和传感器的液晶材料以及食品中的胶体材料等应用至关重要。

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.