BioStruct-Africa: empowering Africa-based scientists through structural biology knowledge transfer and mentoring - recent advances and future perspectives

The African Light Source: history, context and future

The African Light Source (AfLS) project is now almost eight years old. This article assesses the history, current context and future of the project. There is by now considerable momentum in building the user community, including deep training, facilitating access to current facilities, growing the scientific output, scientific networks and growing the local laboratory-scale research infrastructure. The Conceptual Design Report for the AfLS is in its final editing stages. This document specifies the socio-economic and scientific rationales and the technical aspects amongst others. The AfLS is supported by many national and Pan-African scientific professional bodies and voluntary associates across many scientific disciplines, and there are stakeholders throughout the continent and beyond. The current roadmap phases have expanded to include national and Pan-African level conversations with policy makers through new Strategic Task Force groups. The document summarizes this progress and discusses the future of the project.

Hands-on training in structural biology, a tool for sustainable development in Africa series 4

Structural biology is an essential tool for understanding the molecular basis of diseases, which can guide the rational design of new drugs, vaccines, and the optimisation of existing medicines. However, most African countries do not conduct structural biology research due to limited resources, lack of trained persons, and an exodus of skilled scientists. The most urgent requirement is to build on the emerging centres in Africa – some well-established, others growing. This can be achieved through workshops that improve networking, grow skills, and develop mechanisms for access to light source beamlines for defining X-ray structures across the continent. These would encourage the growth of structural biology, which is central to understanding biological functions and developing new antimicrobials and other drugs. In this light, a hands-on training workshop in structural biology series 4 was organised by BioStruct-Africa and the Malaria Research and Training Center (MRTC) in Bamako, Mali, to help bridge this gap. The workshop was hosted by MRTC from the 25th to 28th of April 2022. Through a series of lectures and practicals, the workshop enlightened the participants on how structural biology can be utilised to find solutions to the prevalent diseases in Africa. The short training gave them an overview of target selection, protein production and purification, structural determination techniques, and analysis in combination with high-throughput, structure-guided, fragment-based drug design.

Summary: BioStruct-Africa has been building capacity in structural biology for Africa-based biologists and researchers.