Dear All,
we are currently in the process of writing an application to renew the CCPN grant. As part of this process, we are gathering several letters of support, including one signed by members of the international NMR community.
If you are a Principal Investigator and would like to support our application by having your name added to the letter below, please reply either to me or to Helen Mott, Chair of the CCPN Executive Committee (hrm28@cam.ac.uk), stating your name, position, institution and country.
With the deadline looming, please could you reply by the end of Thursday, 24 April 2020 to ensure your name is added.
For those interested, a summary of our proposal can be downloaded from https://ccpn.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/CCPN-Partnership-renewal-proposal-2025-summary.pdf
Many thanks and best wishes,
Vicky Higman
on behalf of the CCPN Working Group and Executive Committee
Letter of Support for CCPN grant submission to MRC:
We the undersigned would like to express our strongest possible support for the CCPN project and the benefits that it brings to the international NMR Community.
The advances in biomolecular-NMR have been driven by continuously improving experimental equipment, as exemplified by 1/1.2 GHz NMR spectrometers now being installed in the UK and elsewhere, together with sophisticated data analysis tools that increasingly are drawing upon machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). Simultaneously, there is an increasing need to ensure that NMR data analysis and interpretation is straightforward, even for non-experts, automated wherever possible, and reliable and reproducible in its outcomes. This presents a considerable challenge since NMR is both very powerful but also quite complicated.
The CCPN project and its CcpNmr software suite operates at the forefront of all these exciting new developments. The CcpNmr programmes are used by a large and ever-growing number of researchers in laboratories across the world. The CCPN outreach and training programme is extensive and its outreach supports a vibrant scientific community across the UK and the world.
The support for the CcpNmr software suite and its continued development is an essential component of the NMR research infrastructure. The many rapid changes in NMR data analysis demands that the tools be continuously updated and renewed, yet remain understandable for non-expert users. CcpNmr’s track record is exemplar in their effort to remain at the forefront of such developments. Simultaneously, together with its partners, CCPN also ensures the compatibility and integration of legacy software that otherwise would become unavailable to the community and would disrupt accepted data-analysis workflows.
Furthermore, CCPN has for many years been a central player working towards compatibility and FAIR data exchange between different NMR software packages. Its co-ordination of the NMR Exchange Format (NEF), the first NMR data format adopted by a truly wide range of NMR software projects, is finally allowing data transfer without loss of information, which had been a major issue in the community. With this milestone, together with its partners, CCPN has achieved the integration of NMR structural analysis with robust data flow protocols between different programs and projects, and a simple means of preparing data for submission to the various databases (e.g wwPDB and BioMagResBank). Such submissions are an essential part of the publication process, necessary for data sharing and long-term data management and storage as well as forming an important resource for AI-based studies. What has previously been achieved for structural data now needs to be replicated for dynamics data and CCPN has already formulated the initiative to drive this development.
In summary, CCPN is an essential feature of the international scientific NMR community and we urge the UKRI/MRC Committee to support the renewal application entitled “The Collaborative Computational Project for NMR (CCPN); a partnership to develop tools and knowledge for biomolecular NMR research and its community”.
Yours sincerely,