The Institut Laue-Langevin is an international research centre at the leading edge of neutron science and technology.

The Institute operates the most intense neutron source in the world, feeding intense beams of neutrons to a suite of 40 high-performance instruments that are constantly upgraded.

As a service institute the ILL makes its facilities and expertise available to visiting scientists and every year, some 1200 researchers from over 40 countries visit the ILL. More than 800 experiments selected by a scientific review committee are performed annually. Research focuses primarily on fundamental science in a variety of fields: condensed matter physics, chemistry, biology, nuclear physics and materials science,...

All the scientists at the ILL - chemists, physicists, biologists, crystallographers, specialists in magnetism and nuclear physics - are also experts in neutron research and technology and their combined know-how is made available to the scientific community.

ILL is funded and managed by France, Germany and the United Kingdom, in partnership with 10 other European countries.

For more details, please consult the ILL User Guide.

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility operates the most powerful synchrotron radiation source in Europe. Each year around 4000 researchers from over 45 countries travel to Grenoble where they work in a first-class scientific environment to conduct exciting experiments at the cutting edge of modern science. The Facility operates over 40 high-intensity beamlines, and over 1500 experiments selected by the beam time allocation panels are performed annually.

At the ESRF, physicists work side by side with chemists and materials scientists. Biologists, medical doctors, meteorologists, geophysicists and archaeologists have become regular users. Industrial applications are also growing, notably in the fields of pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, petrochemicals and microelectronics.

The ESRF is a joint facility supported and shared by 19 European countries.

For more details, please consult the ESRF User Guide.

EMBL Grenoble, France, is a laboratory of about 85 people, located in very close proximity to two unique European facilities for research in structural biology: the nuclear reactor of the Institut Laue Langevin (ILL), which provides high flux neutron beams, and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), which produces amongst the world's most intense X-ray beams.

EMBL Grenoble has three main activities:

*Develop methods and instrumentation for structure determination by X-ray and neutron crystallography.

*Research in molecular structural biology notably in the fields of protein-RNA complexes involved in RNA metabolism and translation; protein-DNA complexes involved in transcription; structure, assembly and host-cell interactions of viruses, and proteins involved in membrane fusion.

*Develop instruments and technologies dedicated to automated expression and crystallisation of proteins.

These activities are divided into nine research groups. EMBL Grenoble has a very active in-house research unit in structural biology making use of a wide range of techniques including molecular biology, biochemistry, electron microscopy, light scattering, neutron scattering, X-ray crystallography and computing.  There is a strong tradition in studying systems involving protein-nucleic acid complexes and viruses. Structural work on aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases is particularly well-known.

EMBL is part of the Partnership for Structural Biology (PSB), established by a Memorandum of Understanding in 2002 by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), the Institut Laue Langevin (ILL) and the Institut de Biologie Structurale (IBS) to provide a unique environment for state-of-the-art integrated structural biology (Deuteration and isotope labeling, High-throughput crystallisation & screening for soluble protein expression and Multiprotein complex expression with baculovirus/insect cell system).

For more details, please consult the EMBL Grenoble Outstation Services page.