Biospectroscopy at the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre.

in 2006 in central Manchester on Princess Street. The MIB is a large research facility (13,100 m 2) initially costing approximately UK£38 million to construct, and home to a wide range of primary research laboratories, computational research laboratories, core technology facilities, lecture theatre, meeting rooms and offices over a total of five floors (Figure 1). It can accommodate 600 research staff in up to 75 research groups from diverse fields. The internal architecture reflects the ethos of this interdisciplinary environment with much of the laboratory space being multifunctional and open plan, featuring a range of constantly updating high-tech and high-spec facilities. This has been said to help ensure that the widest possible range of expertise and techniques can be brought to bear on quantitative biosci-ence problems and to promote interdisciplinary, challenge-orientated bioscience and biotechnology at the highest international level [101]. Research in MIB is said to address a number of grand challenges, including industrial biotechnology , energy and biofuels, and biomedical healthcare. These grand challenges are realized via four main research themes (biomolec-ular mechanism and catalysis, synthetic and chemical biology, systems biology and enabling technologies), which undertake studies at the molecular, systems and design levels. Of course, much of this research is underpinned by these enabling technologies, and the aim of this spotlight is to focus attention on just one aspect of these, namely biospectroscopy, and specifically, vibrational spectroscopy in MIB. This is an area of research across three of the research groups, which could be said to exemplify the fundamental and applied aspects of this field, its interdisciplinary nature, and the way it realizes several of the research themes mentioned above. Peter Gardner is head of an internationally recognized biomedical spectroscopy research group within the MIB. This group has focused on the application of IR spectroscopy to the study of prostate and other urological cancers, in collaboration with the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research [102] amongst others. In the UK, cancers of the lung, bowel, breast and prostate account for 47% of all cancer deaths, with prostate cancer having the second highest mortality rate in men after lung cancer [103]. The Gardner group at MIB have undertaken FT-IR spectroscopic ana lysis of prostate tissue and cell lines, from both benign and malignant prostate cancers for several years, starting with a pilot study published in the Journal of Pathology in 2003 [1]. It was during this pilot study that they …