Instruct-ERIC Services
Access to Infrastructure
Instruct offers access to innovative equipment to industry and academic users worldwide.
To make it easy for you to further your research, Instruct offers open access to structural biology infrastructure at our Instruct Centres. The application and review process is efficient, transparent and quick.
Applications for access can be submitted at any time. Periodically, special calls for access will be published with a defined deadline. These special calls carry specific criteria, so please read the calls carefully.
Training Courses
Our education programme helps to train European structural and cell biologists to become proficient in a range of technologies, not just one specialism. These researchers will be able to integrate different technologies to open up new areas of research, enhancing the reputations of their research institutes and companies.
Instruct puts together an annual Training Programme, comprising a set of hands on workshops delivered by internationally recognised experts to cover a broad range of structural biology techniques and processes.
A call for training courses is opened each year, to allow Instruct Centres to bid for courses which they would like to offer.
View Instruct Training Programme
R&D Pilot Research Award
Instruct allocates resources to support a limited number of pilot studies proposed by researchers from Instruct member countries. Pilot projects may be funded up to a maximum of 15000 Euros. The funds are expected to cover research expenses but not normally salaries. The intent of this support is to help researchers develop external funding for projects, i.e. the expectation is that a pilot study will lead to a grant submission to national or international funding bodies.
Each year we open a call for R&D Pilot projects in late summer. The applications are peer reviewed by expert scientists, prior to the awards being made. For information about the R&D Pilot projects awarded in previous years, click here. To receive notifications when the next R&D Pilot project opens, please register for Instruct-ERIC membership, whereby you will be added to our mailing list, and all set up to apply.
Internships
Internships facilitate valuable collaborations with Instruct research groups applying techniques that are not available in the applicant’s laboratory and the longer duration of awards allows interns to gain in depth experience in the host laboratory. Applications should specifically focus on the benefit to the applicant’s research. Internships funding has two components: One component covers travel and subsistence expenditures for the fellow up to 6000 Euros. The second component is a regular Instruct Access Project associated to the internship, contemplating a maximum expenditure of 6000 Euros (equivalent to 4 access visits), following standard cost rules for Instruct Access Projects. Find out more more information about internships here.
Instruct Structural Biennial Conference
Instruct organises a scientific conference biennially to showcase integrative structural biology and its impact on biological research and biomedicine. The inaugural conference took place in Heidelberg in 2013 and attracted 200 structural biologists with the participation of our colleagues from other biomedical research infrastructures. Successive biennial conferences took place in Florence, Brno, Madrid, and Utrecht.
The 6th Instruct Biennial Structural Biology Conference, will take place in May 2026, in Brussels.
