Josef Dadok National NMR Centre

Head of Core Facility

Pavel Kadeřávek
Phone: +420 54949 6425
Mobile:
e-mail: pavel.kaderavek@ceitec.muni.cz
Office:Kamenice 753/5, Brno, 625 00, office C04/127

Dedication

The Centre is named after Professor Josef Dadok, a pioneer of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in Czechoslovakia and an important figure in the NMR instrumentation and methodology worldwide.

In the 1950s, Josef Dadok and his team at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences developed instruments for high resolution NMR spectroscopy. Based on his design, Tesla Brno Company started industrial production of NMR spectrometers in 1965, making Czechoslovakia only the third country in the world (after the U.S. and Japan) to master the production of this sophisticated instrumentation.

Since late 1960s, Josef Dadok worked and lived in the USA where he became professor of chemical instrumentation at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. Among his accomplishments there is a development of the first 600 MHz (14.1 T) magnet suitable for high resolution NMR spectroscopy in 1970s.

For his achievements, Professor Josef Dadok was awarded doctor honoris causa degree by Masaryk University in 2013.

Main Activity

Core Facility of High Field NMR Spectroscopy provides access to NMR spectrometers in the range of proton frequencies from 500 MHz to 950 MHz. The equipment is suited mainly to the studies of structure, dynamics and interactions of biomolecules, i.e. proteins, nucleic acids and carbohydrates. However, the instrumentation is flexible enough to cover also various research needs in material science, organic and inorganic chemistry, biochemistry, biology and biophysics.

Unique Features

NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) spectroscopy is a key technology for research in modern life sciences allowing detailed investigation of biomolecular structure and dynamics at the atomic level, both in solutions and in solid state. The successful application of NMR in biology requires multidisciplinary approach combining knowledge in biochemistry, molecular biology, quantum physics, electronics, data analysis, and computational chemistry. The high-end instrumentation and the team of experienced researchers will ensure expert services, user training, and the cost-effective use of resources both for internal and external users. Benefits include access to state-of-the-art high-field NMR instrumentation and support in processing, analysis and interpretation of the experimental data. External user projects will be selected by peer review on the basis of scientific merit, technical suitability and feasibility. The centre will also offer training enabling non-specialists to develop the necessary skills.

The Core Facility is part of Czech national centre of European Research Infrastructure Consortium INSTRUCT ERIC under the Czech Infrastructure for Integrative Structural Biology (CIISB) funded by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic. Foreign users can also benefit from access through projects iNEXT-Discovery and Alliance4Life. The facility also participates in the Remote NMR (R-NMR) consortium.

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