BBB Seminar: Arne O. Smalås
Research activities at the Norwegian Structural Biology Centre (NorStruct)
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Arne O. Smalås
Norwegian Structural Biology Center, Department of Chemistry, University of Tromsø
NorStruct is a research and competence center for biomolecular research in Norway. The center is running a range of in-house projects as well as being a partner in research projects owned by other institutions in Norway and abroad. NorStruct has for the past 10 years been operating as a national service platform within the FUGE-initiative, but is from 2013 run by the University of Tromsø. Structure-function relation studies of biologically active macromolecules are a focus. In addition, the approximately 50 employees at the Centre cover a range of other areas, including bio- and chemoinformatics, genomics, microbiology, and drug discovery and design.
Central research topics of NorStruct are anticancer and antibiotic resistance research, the development of new biocatalysts for applications and the biology of pathogenic microorganisms. The development of biocatalysts for industrial applications by the study of Arctic marine microorganisms will be highlighted in the talk. The search for new enzymes is carried out from both functional screening of metagenomic libraries and bacterial isolates and from in silico screening of sequenced genomes and metagenomes.
Host: Aurora Martinez, Department of Biomedicine
