Brief History
EMBL Grenoble began in 1975 with an agreement with the ILL to use neutron beams to investigate biological structures. In the 1980s, the development of neutron scattering techniques and instrumentation gave fruit in a joint ILL/EMBL diffractometer which was used to study the structure of crystals of complexes such as the nucleosome, ribosome, viruses and membrane proteins.
The in-house development of our facilities for the production of deuterated biological material, electron microscopy and x-ray crystallography took place. The 1994 opening of ESRF's third generation synchrotron opened a new path for EMBL Grenoble. The creation of a precision automated microdiffraction meter expanded the use of x-ray crystallography and broadened the scope of structural biology.
In 2002, EMBL Grenoble entered the era of structural genomics by forming a joint venture with the neighboring institutes ILL/ERSR/IBS/UJF to create the Partnership for Structural Biology (PSB)
Since autumn 2005, a new facility has provided on site infrastructures of stages of protein expression facilities, crystallisation robots and sample environment on the beamline for structural determination.