Cooperations - Structural Analysis

Our team continuously keeps effective national and international cooperation with many academic institutions and industrial partners. This cooperation follows from the high-quality research conducted at the Joint Laboratory of ss-NMR Spectroscopy of IMC and JHIPC. This laboratory, as a core infrastructure, was founded in 2002. Currently the Laboratory is equipped with the 500 MHz solid-state NMR spectrometer and in 2020 will be further expanded with 700 MHz ss-NMR spectrometer. Over nearly 20 years of service, this infrastructure has produced a number of unique results that have led to the discovery of a number of new phenomena. The results of this research have been presented in more than 250 publications, which have received considerable attention, as evidenced by a total citation of ca. 5000.

Jaroslav Heyrovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry (JHIPC) CAS

Our main partner involved in national cooperation is the Jaroslav Heyrovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry CAS. We operate ss-NMR spectrometer together and with the researchers of this institute, we collaborate on the development of novel zeolite-based catalysts and their advanced structural analysis. This collaboration and high quality of the obtained results can be demonstrated by a number of joint contributions such as Angewandte Chemie https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.201409635 or Chemical Communications https://doi.org/10.1039/C5CC01830G.

TEVA Pharmaceuticals and partners (Raciopharm, Pliva, etc.)

Our team started cooperation with the pharmaceutical company TEVA Pharmaceuticals and associated companies in 2001. Since then, we have been performing independent quality control of the produced pharmaceuticals, a range of advanced structure analyses as well as we have been developing new analytical strategies for the novel formulated dosage forms. As a result, each year we analyze hundreds of APIs and dosage forms and our laboratory has become strategically important. Moreover, the part of the project dealing with NMR crystallography is conducted in cooperation with the Department of Chemistry, University of California at Riverside, USA led by Prof. Gregory Beran. This cooperation is supported by the joint CR-USA project (LTAUSA18011). In addition, we also strive to involve other academic institutions in this research and to develop advanced strategies of NMR crystallography. Just recently, the concentrated research of four academic institutions and TEVA company, that is grouped around the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, resulted in the development of a range of advanced experimental-computational strategies for the structure determination of complex multicomponent systems (for instance see publications Molecular Pharmaceutics https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.7b00167 or CGD https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.cgd.8b00402.

Department of Material Chemistry, Ångström Advanced Battery Centre, Uppsala University (Professor Daniel Brandell) – development of advanced poly-electrolytes and solar cell materials
Division of Biomolecular and Organic Electronics, Linköping University (Professor Feng Gao) – development of advanced poly-electrolytes and solar cell materials
Hunter College of the City University of New York (Professor Steve G. Greenbaum) – development of advanced poly-electrolytes

Since 2019, when we organized a series of workshops, we have extensively cooperated with the researchers from the research centers mentioned above. Our joint research is focused on the development of advanced energy related materials for solar cells. Although this collaboration is relatively fresh, we have already reached several significant results published in the topical journals such as

ACS Appl. Energy Mater. 2019, 2, 7, 4925-4935 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsaem.9b00607

Nature Commun. 11: 891 (2020) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14747-6

Science Advances https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/45/eabb5381.abstract

Adv. Funct. Mater. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adfm.202005521.

Cooperation with the Institute of Materials Research of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (Dr. R. Bures and coworkers) – development of advanced materials for soft magnetic composites

At last but not least, we must introduce our long-term cooperation with the Institute of Materials Research SAV. We also extensively work on the development and structural analysis of metal-organic frameworks for application in catalysis.

Cooperation with the National Institute for Material Science (NIMS), Tsukuba, Japan ( Jonathan P. Hill, group leader, Functional Chromophores Group)

Since 2016, there is an effective international collaboration between the team STRUCTURE and NIMS, Tsukuba, Japan. NIMS belongs to the best research institution in Japan (with, for example, nine “Highly Cited Researchers 2019”). Our main collaborator is Dr. Jan Labuta, a senior staff scientist at MANA, NIMS and we also partially collaborate with Dr. Jonathan P. Hill. Together, we are developing and characterizing novel materials that are responsive to different stimuli (e.g. temperature, pH, solvent composition, etc.). Our recent effort is focused on phase behavior of porphyrin-polymer molecular conjugates in aqueous media for sensing and biomedical applications. Within this collaboration, Ms. Velychkivska was awarded with two short-term fellowships at NIMS (nine months in total), which were financially supported by NIMS.