NCBR History
National Centre for Biomolecular Research (NCBR) was established in 2001 as a new Department of the Faculty of Science focused on advanced interdisciplinary methods to study biologically interesting molecules at the atomic level. The instrumentation and computer equipment, together with the team of highly qualified experts with strong experience from abroad and a close cooperation with CEITEC MU, make NCBR the leading workplace of this type on the national and international scale.
The establishment of NCBR was financially supported by a grant from the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic, whose guarantor was prof. Jaroslav Koča, the first director of NCBR (until his death in July 2021). His research team of experts in computational chemistry and molecular modeling became one of the main pillars of the NCBR research. Other scientific activities involved highly specific areas such as NMR spectroscopy, glycobiochemistry, molecular modeling of nucleic acids and protein engineering. Since 2005, NCBR team has been extended by several talented junior researchers, who brought not only new ideas and research topics (DNA repair, Structural biology of gene regulation, RNA quality control) but also prestigious international grant support (EMBO grants, Welcome Trust etc.).
In 2013, the Laboratory of Functional Genomics and Proteomics headed by prof. Jiří Fajkus joined the NCBR Department with the focus mainly on elucidating the mechanisms regulating plant growth and development, chromatin structure, and study of the role of telomeres in genome stability processes. Nowadays, the research at the Department is divided into nine independent groups according to their research focus. In April 2022, prof. Michaela Wimmerová was appointed as the new director of the Centre.