PLATO establishes a novel national mass spectrometry imaging platform for biomolecular profiling of tissues and microbial communities and it rejuvenates the Danish functional proteomics research infrastructure.
PLATO is a large and costly initiative across six partner institutions, with major centres at SDU and KU and associated platforms at AU, AAU, DTU and OUH.
PLATO includes internationally leading top-researchers in biological mass spectrometry and functional proteomics and will directly support more than 400 researchers in academia and industry in Denmark.
PLATO is a distributed research infrastructure accessible for all interested users via a single point of entry.
Training and education
All PLATO participants are actively engaged in PhD education programmes, PhD schools and postdoctoral training in the context of ambitious research projects, including industrial PhD/postdoc programmes supported by Innovation Fund Denmark.
The five PLATO partner universities will have at least 40 PhD students associated with the PLATO-driven research programmes. Furthermore, more than 30 postdoctoral fellows are expected to be employed at any given time in the framework of PLATO activities.
We estimate that the annual number of Bachelor- and Master-level students who will be exposed to the PLATO research infrastructure as part of experimental projects is on the order of 30-40. In addition, laboratory tours and demonstrations will be used in course-format to inform more than 70 undergraduate students per year.
PLATO researchers also contribute to international PhD/postdoc educational programmes, such as EMBO and FEBS courses, EuPA and HUPO activities as well as courses/workshops in EU ITN programmes and COST actions.