Future perspectives
We aim at establishing long term and deep-rooted collaboration going beyond the time frame of the present project and involving Visegrad scientists working in diverse scientific fields like physics, chemistry and biology. Within the project we will build the X-ray spectrometry instrument at ELI facility in Prague for daily use by scientists. Thanks to the use of newest technological solutions and state-of-the-art components, the instrument will support scientific projects for next 10-20 years. The development made within the present grant scheme, will serve for scientists not only from V4 countries, but also the adapted technical solutions may be conveyed at different facilities worldwide and thus being recognized as V4 scientific development. In the future, the instrument will be employed for research focused in the field of biology and chemistry.
As an example, there is considerable interest in developing photoactivated metal-based DNA-targeted drugs, which avoid the severe side effects of metal-based chelation therapies. Few compounds, with different metal centers, like ruthenium or copper, showed promising results as potential photosensitizers. Nevertheless, although their damaging properties towards DNA were proved, little is known about the yield and lifetime of the initially formed electron-transfer products and the metal dynamics. Since all of these processes occur in ultra-fast time domain, femtosecond time-resolution is needed. The data obtained with proposed set up can range from simple qualitative analyses demonstrating how the potential drugs undergoing photo-activation interact with DNA.