Instruct.SI in 2025

Over the past year, members of the Instruct.SI consortium have been actively engaged in advancing integrative structural biology through a broad range of activities. These included the acquisition of new state-of-the-art instruments, the organization of specialized workshops, and continued efforts in research, training, and collaboration. In this post, we highlight some of the key developments and initiatives that marked the year 2025.

New Instruments

• Protein production: two shaker incubators and a chromatography system for preparation and purification of recombinant proteins (National Institute of Chemistry, Department of Molecular Biology and Nanobiotechnology)
• Protein quality control etc: instrument for characterization of protein conformational and colloidal stability NanoTemper Prometheus Panta (University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Chair of Biochemistry)
• Molecular interactions: surface plasmon resonance (SPR) instrument for label-free real-time molecular interaction analysis, Cytiva Biacore 1S+ (University of Ljubljana, Biotechnical Faculty, Department of Biology)
• Macromolecular characterization: Raman spectrometer coupled with atomic force microscopy (AFM) (University of Ljubljana, Biotechnical Faculty, Department of Food Science and Technology, Chair of Biochemistry and Food Chemistry)

Meetings and outreach

• Nanobodies Workshop: Binder Recovery by In Silico and In Vitro Panning, September 22–26, 2025 (University of Nova Gorica), combining computational nanobody discovery with experimental panning workflows
• Rosetta Workshop, October 14–18, 2025 (National Institute of Chemistry), focused on applying PyRosetta and AI tools (RFdiffusion, ProteinMPNN) in protein design, followed by the 4^th EU Rosetta Protein Design Conference, Ljubljana, October 20–22, 2025
• Instruct.SI Cryo-EM Advanced Workshop on Single Particle Analysis, November 11–14, 2025 (National Institute of Chemistry), covering SPA workflow: grid preparation, data collection and data analysis
• Lectures of Peter Podbevšek and Nika Žibrat (National Institute of Chemistry), at the Instruct-ERIC Webinar Series Structure Meets Function, June 17, 2025
• Cryo-EM facility at the National Institute of Chemistry hosted >90 external visitors
• Workshop on Structural Biology and Physiology, September 26, 2025, and Regional Physiology Meeting, September 24–27, 2025, Ljubljana

Building on these achievements, Instruct.SI enters the coming year well positioned to further strengthen research infrastructure, expertise, and collaboration in integrative structural biology.