LEAPS IN THE FIGHT AGAINST COVID-19

LEAPS facilities are joining forces in front of the coronavirus pandemic, offering their capacities to the whole scientific community. Several facilities have opened calls for rapid access to dedicated beamtime for prioritizing the research on the SARS-CoV-2 virus, its therapy and vaccine, above the rest, aiming at minimizing the time from proposal to paper submissions.

Cerdanyola del Vallès, 18th May 2020 LEAPS research infrastructures have recently published the "LEAPS Position Paper on COVID-19", to describe how this European facilities can contribute to fight the SARS-CoV-2 virus thanks to their instrumentation, methods and techniques, as well as to show some examples of first scientific results from LEAPS facilities on COVID-19 related research.

Caterina Biscari, chair of LEAPS during 2020 and director of the ALBA Synchrotron, participated last Friday 15^th May to a round table on "Research Infrastructures in the fight against COVID-19" during the European Research Infrastructures for a smarter future Conference, analysing the challenges and opportunities in this pandemic era for the research infrastructures and highlighting their role in social and economic recovering thanks to their interdisciplinarity.

LEAPS facilities offer a wide-range of state-of-the-art techniques at the service of the world scientific community, such as High-Precision Structure Determination of Relevant Biological Systems, X-ray Imaging and Scattering, Circular Dichroism, Infrared Spectroscopy, Soft X-ray Transient Absorption or UV Fluorescence Imaging.

Many experiments, including those performed by pharmaceutical companies, are being performed and analysed; several initiatives of participation in collaborations with research institutions are being developed: proteins have been resolved and deposited in the Protein Data Base and first publications on SARS-CoV-2 with the contribution of LEAPS members are appearing.

See further and detailed information in the LEAPS Position Paper on COVID-19

LEAPS - the League of European Accelerator-based Photon Sources - is a strategic consortium initiated by the Directors of the Synchrotron Radiation and Free Electron Laser (FEL) user facilities in Europe. LEAPS’ primary goal is to actively ensure and promote the quality and impact of the fundamental, applied and industrial research carried out at their respective facilities to the greater benefit of European science and society. The consortium is composed of sixteen members hosting facilities in different European countries, representing a multidisciplinary research community of more than 24000 scientists, encompassing physicists, chemists, biologists, materials scientists, as well as experts from medicine, geology and cultural heritage.