Resources

UK facilities

• Diamond Light Source

  The UK's synchrotron: macromolecular crystallography, SAXS, imaging and cryo-EM.

• Macromolecular crystallography beamlines, Diamond

  Seven macromolecular crystallography beamlines covering room temperature to cryo, low to high energy (tunable and fixed), fully unattended high-throughput to hands-on specialist experiments, and beams from large to micro- and nanofocus.

• XChem fragment screening, Diamond

  Crystallographic fragment screening: soaking, harvesting, data collection and analysis of up to 1000 compounds in a week.

• Membrane Protein Laboratory (MPL), Diamond

  Research and training facility for membrane protein structures at the Research Complex at Harwell: high-throughput cloning, expression and purification, sample preparation for integrative structural biology. Open to users worldwide; an Instruct-ERIC centre.

• B23 circular dichroism beamline, Diamond

  Synchrotron CD for protein folding, secondary structure and interactions.

• B24 cryo soft X-ray tomography, Diamond

  3D imaging of whole frozen cells (25–40 nm), with correlative cryo light microscopy.

• eBIC, the Electron Bio-Imaging Centre at Diamond

  National facility for cryo-EM and cryo-electron tomography.

• B21 bio-SAXS beamline, Diamond

  Solution scattering, including size-exclusion chromatography SAXS.

• ISIS Neutron and Muon Source

  Neutron scattering, including small-angle neutron scattering.

• Rosalind Franklin Institute

  New imaging and structural biology technologies.

• Instruct-ERIC

  European research infrastructure for structural biology, with funded access to facilities across Europe.

UK structural mass spectrometry

• Kavli Institute for NanoScience Discovery, Oxford

  Native mass spectrometry of membrane proteins and complexes (Robinson group and others).

• Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry Facility, Leeds (Astbury Centre)

  Native MS, ion mobility, hydrogen–deuterium exchange and crosslinking.

• Mass spectrometry and separations facility, Manchester

  Includes the Michael Barber Centre for Collaborative Mass Spectrometry (Manchester Institute of Biotechnology).

UK NMR

• Connect NMR UK

  Network of UK NMR facilities, including access to high-field instruments.

UK biophysical characterisation

• Biomolecular Analysis Core Facility, Manchester

  SPR, MST and ITC for interactions; light scattering and analytical ultracentrifugation for mass and oligomerisation.

• ISMB Protein Crystallography and Biophysics Centre (BiophysX), UCL/Birkbeck

  ITC, DSC and analytical ultracentrifugation.

• Research Complex at Harwell: biophysical instruments

  AUC, SPR, ITC and more, on the Harwell campus.

• BSRC facilities, St Andrews

  Biophysics suite including SPR and ITC.

European facilities

• ESRF

  European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Grenoble.

• EMBL Hamburg

  Beamlines at PETRA III, including bio-SAXS.

• ILL

  Institut Laue-Langevin, neutron source, Grenoble.

• ILL Deuteration Laboratory (D-Lab)
• Elettra

  Synchrotron, Trieste.

• MAX IV

  Synchrotron, Lund.

• SOLEIL

  Synchrotron, Paris-Saclay.

• Swiss Light Source (PSI)

  Synchrotron at the Paul Scherrer Institute.

Worldwide

• Lightsources.org

  News and information from the world's synchrotron and free-electron laser facilities.

• Light sources of the world

  Directory of synchrotrons and FELs, with links to their user programmes.

• ARBRE-MOBIEU

  European network for molecular biophysics: training and access to biophysics facilities.

Crystallography: data processing

• DIALS
• MOSFLM
• HKL
• XDS

Crystallography: structure solution, refinement and model building

• CCP4
• PHENIX
• CNS
• SHARP
• SHELX
• ARP/wARP
• MAID
• SIMBAD

  Sequence-independent molecular replacement.

• SAUC

  Search the PDB for structures with similar unit cells.

• ContaMiner

  Identify crystallisation contaminants.

• Coordinate transformation tool

  Convert between fractional and orthogonal coordinates online.

• Convert CIF to PDB online
• General crystallographic calculator

Cryo-EM and tomography

• CCP-EM

  UK collaborative computational project for cryo-EM.

• RELION
• cryoSPARC
• Warp
• IMOD

  Tomographic reconstruction and modelling.

Bio-SAXS

• ATSAS

  SAXS analysis suite from EMBL Hamburg.

• ATSAS online
• BioXTAS RAW

Imaging

• Fiji (ImageJ)

NMR

• CCPN

  UK collaborative computational project for NMR: software for assignment and analysis.

• NMRbox

  Cloud platform with ready-installed biomolecular NMR software.

Mass spectrometry

• PRIDE

  Proteomics and mass spectrometry data repository at EMBL-EBI.

• UniDec

  Deconvolution of native mass spectra and ion mobility data.

• xiSEARCH (Rappsilber lab)

  Search engine for crosslinking mass spectrometry; with xiFDR and xiVIEW.

Simulation

• GROMACS

  Molecular dynamics simulation package.

• AMBER
• CHARMM-GUI

  Web tool for setting up simulations, including membrane systems.

Biophysics

• SEDFIT and SEDPHAT

  Analysis of analytical ultracentrifugation and other biophysical data.

Modelling, prediction and docking

• AlphaFold Server
• ColabFold
• SWISS-MODEL
• ExPASy
• Modeller
• Rosetta
• Threader (UCL Bioinformatics)
• HADDOCK
• SwissDock
• CCPBioSim

  UK collaborative computational project for biomolecular simulation.

Molecular graphics

• Coot
• CCP4MG
• PyMOL
• ChimeraX
• ISOLDE
• Mol*

  Web-based viewer used by the PDB.

• CueMol
• BIOVIA Discovery Studio Visualizer
• Mini map aide
• Very simple protein space group viewer
• Space group viewer (stereo)
• Crystallify 3D space group viewer
• Symotter 3D space group viewer

Figures, movies and other tools

• Jalview and other Dundee tools

  Coloured sequence alignments.

• LigPlot+
• ImageMagick
• GIMP
• gnuplot
• Vim
• Dose-response curves and enzyme kinetics
• Dose-response curves (alternative site)
• Michaelis–Menten Plotly tool

• wwPDB

  Worldwide Protein Data Bank: deposition of structures.

• PDBe

  Protein Data Bank in Europe, at EMBL-EBI, Hinxton.

• RCSB PDB
• PDBe-KB

  Knowledge base linking structures to function.

• EMDB

  Electron Microscopy Data Bank: maps.

• EMPIAR

  Raw electron microscopy image data.

• BMRB

  Biological Magnetic Resonance Data Bank.

• SASBDB

  Small Angle Scattering Biological Data Bank.

• PDB-IHM

  Integrative and hybrid structural models.

• ProteomeXchange

  Consortium of mass spectrometry data repositories (PRIDE, MassIVE and others).

• AlphaFold Protein Structure Database
• UniProt
• BioImage Archive
• Crystallography Open Database
• EMBL-EBI

  European Bioinformatics Institute.

• Zenodo

  General-purpose open repository (CERN) for datasets, raw data, software and documents, with a DOI for each deposit.

• Bath
• Birmingham
• Bristol
• Cambridge: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
• Cambridge: Cambridge Institute for Medical Research
• Cambridge: Biochemistry
• Cardiff
• Dundee
• Durham
• Edinburgh
• Exeter
• Glasgow
• Keele
• Leicester
• Leeds: Astbury Centre
• Liverpool
• London: Birkbeck/UCL
• London: Francis Crick Institute
• London: Institute of Cancer Research
• London: Imperial College
• London: King's College
• London: Queen Mary
• Manchester
• Newcastle
• Norwich: John Innes Centre
• Norwich: UEA
• Nottingham
• Oxford: Biochemistry
• Oxford: Structural Biology (STRUBI)
• Portsmouth
• Reading
• Sheffield
• Southampton
• St Andrews
• Sussex
• Warwick
• York: York Structural Biology Laboratory

Our parent society and crystallography

• British Crystallographic Association (BCA)

  The BSG is a special interest group of the BCA.

• International Union of Crystallography (IUCr)
• European Crystallographic Association (ECA)
• American Crystallographic Association (ACA)

Biosciences and chemistry

• Biochemical Society
• Royal Society of Biology
• Royal Society of Chemistry
• Institute of Physics
• Microbiology Society
• The Protein Society
• EMBO

  European life-sciences organisation: courses, workshops and fellowships.

Techniques

• British Biophysical Society

  UK society for biophysics: meetings and early-career support.

• European Biophysical Societies' Association (EBSA)
• British Mass Spectrometry Society (BMSS)
• British Society for Proteome Research (BSPR)
• Royal Microscopical Society

Drug discovery and biotech

• Astex Pharmaceuticals (Cambridge)

  Pioneer of fragment-based drug discovery; part of the Otsuka group.

• AstraZeneca (Cambridge)

  Crystallography and cryo-EM teams supporting drug discovery.

• GSK (Stevenage)

  Structural biology and biophysics, including native MS and HDX-MS.

• Immunocore (Abingdon)

  T-cell receptor therapeutics; crystal structures of engineered TCRs.

• Isomorphic Labs (London)

  AI-driven drug discovery.

• Nxera Pharma (Cambridge)

  GPCR structure-based drug design (formerly Heptares).

• OMass Therapeutics (Oxford)

  Native mass spectrometry platform for membrane and complex-bound targets.

Contract research and protein production

• Diamond Light Source Industrial Liaison (Harwell)

  Industrial access to Diamond's facilities and services.

• Charles River (Chesterford Research Park)

  Crystallography and fragment screening within integrated drug discovery.

• Domainex (Cambridge)

  Protein production, crystallography and medicinal chemistry services.

• Evotec (Alderley Park)

  Drug discovery with structural biology.

• Sygnature Discovery (Nottingham, Alderley Park; includes Peak Proteins, Macclesfield)

  Protein production, biophysics and structural biology services.

• Bruker
• Hampton Research
• Jena Bioscience
• Luminorum
• marXperts
• MiTeGen
• Molecular Dimensions (Calibre Scientific UK)
• Oxford Cryosystems
• P212121
• Qiagen
• Rigaku
• Technology Networks
• Xenocs
• Calibre Scientific UK (Sheffield)

  Protein science products; includes Molecular Dimensions, Protein Ark and BioServUK.

UK research councils (UKRI)

• UKRI funding finder

  Search all open UKRI opportunities.

• BBSRC

  Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council: the main funder of bioscience research.

• MRC

  Medical Research Council.

• EPSRC

  Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, including methods and instrumentation.

• STFC

  Science and Technology Facilities Council, which runs the UK's large facilities.

Charities and foundations

• Wellcome

  Discovery research, fellowships and awards.

• Cancer Research UK
• British Heart Foundation
• Leverhulme Trust
• Royal Society

  Fellowships and research grants, including the University Research Fellowship.

• LifeArc

  Translational medical research.

• Versus Arthritis
• Biochemical Society grants and bursaries

  Travel grants and bursaries for members.

Europe and international

• European Research Council (ERC)

  The UK has been associated to Horizon Europe since January 2024, so UK-based researchers can apply.

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

  Fellowships and doctoral networks.

• UK Research Office (UKRO)

  Guidance for UK researchers applying to EU programmes.

• EMBO funding

  Postdoctoral fellowships, scientific exchange grants, courses and workshops.

• Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP)

  International, interdisciplinary fellowships and grants.

Access to facilities (free at the point of use)

• Diamond Light Source: apply for beamtime

  Peer-reviewed access to beamlines and eBIC.

• Instruct-ERIC

  Funded access to structural biology infrastructure across Europe.

Jobs

• jobs.ac.uk

  UK academic and research jobs.

• Nature Careers
• EURAXESS

  Research jobs across Europe.

• Lightsources.org careers

  Jobs at synchrotron and free-electron laser facilities worldwide.

• Diamond Light Source vacancies

  Jobs at the UK's synchrotron, including beamline and industrial liaison scientists.

• EMBL jobs
• MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology careers
• Rosalind Franklin Institute careers
• STFC careers (including ISIS)
• CCP4BB mailing list

  Crystallography discussion list; jobs are often posted.

• 3DEM mailing list

  Cryo-EM discussion list; jobs are often posted.

• Industry careers: Astex
• Industry careers: AstraZeneca
• Industry careers: Domainex
• Industry careers: Evotec Alderley Park
• Industry careers: GSK
• Industry careers: Immunocore
• Industry careers: Isomorphic Labs
• Industry careers: Nxera
• Industry careers: Sygnature Discovery

PhD study

• FindAPhD

  Search for funded PhD projects, e.g. "structural biology".

• DiscoverPhDs
• Prospects: PhD study

  Guide to applying for and funding a PhD in the UK.

• UKRI: developing people and skills

  UK research council studentships, mostly through doctoral training partnerships.

• EMBL International PhD Programme