The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) has awarded a Block Allocation Group (BAG) to the Structural Biology Unit of CIC bioGUNE, in collaboration with the Biophysics Unit at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and the University of Cantabria. This means they receive funding to measure X-ray diffraction of biological macromolecules for a period of six months.

The ESRF (www.esrf.eu), located in Grenoble (France), is an international institute, funded by 19 countries, that operates Europe's most powerful synchrotron light source and hosts 6000 scientific user visits per year. To this effect, use of the Facility by research groups is free due to the public funding that ESRF receives, although they must be approved by its scientific committee.

The experiments that the crystallographers from the Structural Biology Unit of CIC bioGUNE, from the UPV/EHU and from the University of Cantabria conduct at the ESRF consist of making a beam of high-energy X-rays (with a wavelength of about 1 Armstrong) strike protein crystals so that, from the diffraction spectrum created, the three-dimensional structure of these macromolecules can be determined.

The essential feature that synchrotron radiation provides in comparison to the X-ray facilities that structural biology laboratories usually have is that it enables the energy of the beam of light used to be regulated, as well as being much more intense and smaller in diameter.

Overall, these features enable very high resolution data to be obtained about the three-dimensional structure of proteins which, once known, allows their biological function to be inferred.