ABRF 2018, "The Premier Conference for Core Services" will bring together international leaders in our core disciplines to provide a vision of what can be done, and insight toward making further progress as we work in the present. Core facilities are uniquely positioned to lead efforts to develop and optimize workflows for the generation of reproducible data, as well as to implement and disseminate these methods among laboratories. Meeting attendees will have the opportunity to be inspired by recent scientific advances, as well as to gain practical knowledge on implementing methodologies today in order to support future discoveries.

Magnetic resonance remains the technique of choice to investigate structure, dynamics and interactions of biomolecules at physiological conditions and to characterize heterogeneous materials at atomic details in the solid state. However, the strengths of magnetic resonance need to be reframed in the new general context characterized by the recent developments of NMR and EPR as well as of other structural techniques, such as cryoelectron microscopy, fluorescence, small angle scattering and mass spectrometry. This EMBO Workshop aims at grouping scientists proposing the most advanced NMR and EPR applications together with experts in combining magnetic resonance techniques with other structural and computational tools.

In the past few years, electron cryomicroscopy (cryo-EM) has emerged as an important tool for the analysis of biomolecular structures at resolutions that allow construction of atomic models. However, cryo-EM has the potential to do more than determine molecular structures. Cryotomography can describe cellular morphology at resolutions inaccessible to other techniques. Single particle methods have the potential to explore heterogeneity in macromolecules and time-dependent processes. Hybrid methods can be used study protein structure and organization in the context of living cells.