18.5 million euro for large-scale NMR research facility

The participating partners will make their state-of-the-art technology, equipment and expertise available to other researchers in the Netherlands.

In total, five programmes in the Netherlands receive financing from NWO within the National Road Map for Large-scale Research Facilities, for which 80 million euro was made available.This is announced by State Secretary Zijlstra of OCW and Jos Engelen, chairman of NWO.

The ‘uNMR-NL’-program is a consortium of Utrecht University, the Radboud University Nijmegen, Leiden University, Wageningen University, the Eindhoven University of Technology and TI-COAST.

An ultra-high field NMR facility for the Netherlands (uNMR-NL). In the new uNMR-NL facility, researchers will use magnetic nuclear resonance (NMR) and MR Imaging (MRI) to study the origin of diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, to identify new potential drugs, to develop new materials for batteries and solar cells and to enhance the production of crops and food quality. “The facility that is being set up will contain a new magnet that is stronger than ever before in NMR and MRI”, says Marc Baldus, professor at the Bijvoet Center of Utrecht University and coordinator of the project: “This will open up entirely new ways of research, for example to study complete cells at the level of individual atoms.”

Henk Van As, scientific director of Wageningen NMR Centre says: “This new facility opens up fantastic new possibilities for the Wageningen research areas: combined MRI microscopy and spectroscopy, metabolomics and protein structure/dynamics”.