NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) and the Center for Integrative Proteomics at Rutgers University (CIPR) have teamed to launch a public-private partnership aimed at developing new proteomics research applications and working with industrial and academic research partners.
The new center, located within the CIPR and alongside The Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB) Protein Data Bank, will provide the UK-based CCDC with an operations base in North America, Rutgers said Thursday.
The CIPR is a 75,000 square-foot, $47 million facility that opened in 2012 at Rutgers' Busch Science Campus in Piscataway, NJ, and houses core facilities for mass spectrometry, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, cryo-electron microscopy, and computational biology.
The CCDC compiles and distributes the Cambridge Structural Database, a comprehensive resource for small molecule crystal structure data, to more than 1,200 academic and 200 commercial organizations around the world.
To service these North American research communities, which account for about half of all of the CCDC's users, it has launched CCDC Inc. to partner with the CIPR, and has appointed Paul Davie to be GM of the new venture.
The CCDC Inc. operation at Rutgers will provide support in several areas, including small molecule, crystallography, drug discovery and development, and materials science applications.
Colin Groom, executive director of the CCDC, said in a statement that the collaboration "will allow us to develop and implement new integrated approaches to discovery, based on the latest validated data from reliable sources. We hear continually from our partners about the importance of developing efficient workflows across data domains – this collaboration sees the potential of great steps forward towards this vision."
Stephen Burley, director of CIPR and associate director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank, said the partnership "will enhance our interdisciplinary research efforts on biomolecules large and small and deliver new synergies between the RCSB Protein Data Bank and the CCDC."