Centro Nacional de Biotecnología (CNB) Areas of research: Life sciences (multidisciplinary) Location: Madrid Webpage: www.cnb.csic.es; Contact: proyectos@cnb.csic.es
At the Spanish National Biotechnology Centre (Centro Nacional de Biotecnología, CNB), 70 multidisciplinary research groups and 20 scientific-technical units strive at unlocking the secrets of living things. Their common goal is to apply research results to the development of new compounds and technologies that provide innovative solutions to four major societal challenges: infectious diseases, inflammation and cancer, sustainability of food production, and environmental pollution. Research at the CNB greatly profits from an excellent scientific-technical infrastructure in structural and cell biology, including leading-edge equipment for advanced light and electron microscopy, emergent ‘omics’ approaches (cellomics, genomics, proteomics and different protein tools), genetically modified mouse models (transgenesis, embryo cryopreservation, histology), as well as bioinformatics and computational biology (bioinformatics for genomics and proteomics, sequence analysis and structure prediction, scientific computing). The Centre also provides large research installations, such as an animal facility with capacity for 25,000 mice, a large greenhouse and several bio-containment laboratories, including one of the few high-level biocontainment (BSL-3) laboratories that are currently operative in Spain. The CNB contributes to the development of pan-European research platforms (ESFRI) by hosting EMMA/Infrafrontier, the Spanish node for the generation, phenotyping, archiving and distribution of genetically modified mouse models, and the Instruct Image Processing Centre (I2PC), the European reference infrastructure for image processing in structural biology. CNB scientists stand out for their success in international calls, with about one third of the Centre’s competitive funding coming from international entities, mainly the European Commission - including 8 ERC grants -, but also from other sources, such as the NIH, the Human Frontier Science Programme or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
18 I. Life Sciences
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Centro Nacional de Biotecnología (CNB)
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