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DTU gets a share of EUR 5,5 million research pool

Enzymes and proteins

The Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science has granted more than EUR 5 million to five Danish universities and protein research. DTU will be awarded part of the grant.

A new national platform will strengthen research into proteins, e.g. in connection with cell development and antimicrobial agent resistance. The project is called PRO-MS (Danish National Mass Spectrometry Platform for Functional Proteomics) and is supported with more than EUR 5 million from the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science.

The large grant ensures that the universities can purchase and use the newest and most efficient measuring equipment for mapping and studying protein compositions. PRO-MS is a number of mass spectrometers which are highly sophisticated instruments for high-accuracy measuring of the chemical composition and properties of proteins in plants, micro-organisms, and mammals.

Boosting research at DTU
The platform is coordinated by the University of Southern Denmark and with DTU as an important player, it will give researchers from all over Denmark better opportunities to map how proteins function in, for example, food, biomedicine, and plants—including identifying the mechanisms behind antimicrobial resistance in animals and humans.

“PRO-MS will boost protein research at DTU. It can be used to determine and characterize protein function and structure within a wide range of areas, including biotechnology, biomedicine, cell biology, microbiology, and food research,” says Professor Birte Svensson, DTU Systems Biology.

Across universities
PRO-MS is awarded the grant of DKK 40.1 million from a state pool, which is to be used to strengthen the infrastructure and technology developments in Danish research. Six months ago, the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science published the Danish Roadmap for Research Infrastructure 22 (Dansk Roadmap for Forskningsinfrastruktur 2015), which is a catalogue of 22 priority-ranked proposals for new national research infrastructures.

University of Southern Denmark, Aalborg University, Aarhus University, Technical University of Denmark, and University of Copenhagen is participating in PRO-MS. In addition, the stage is set for cooperationwith biotech, pharmaceutical, and food companies.