The main goal of the UCMR Research School is to stimulate graduate research education in new research interfaces between medicine-biology-chemistry-physics and to promote the recruitment of young researchers to new emerging research areas that encompass chemical-biology approaches. Through educating young researchers, we will develop a strong, sustainable research environment for infection biology and molecular infection medicine research at Umeå University. We anticipate that additional applications for small organic chemical molecules to study biological processes outside of microbial virulence will be included. This planned broadening of our program will lead to the development of a new curriculum for graduate studies within chemical biology.

• We aim to create an environment where chemists and biologists can communicate with one another on theory, methodology, design of experiments and the end results so that fruitful collaborations and training in chemical biology can be established.
• We will develop courses to bridge the present day doctoral curriculums for chemists and biologists to provide interdisciplinary training in chemical biology. We will use the experience of introducing our present students to the chemical biology approach to aid in the design of these courses.
• While developing the present courses and program at the graduate level, we expect that a curriculum in chemical biology for undergraduate students also will be developed, thus increasing their option to enter into the doctoral program with sufficient training.

Research in chemical biology is normally dispersed between several departments at a university. Thus, the planned development of a strong curriculum in chemical biology requires a student exchange program between departments and universities. The UCMR is based on interdisciplinary research approaches by collaborating research groups from different departments and faculties and will be linked to international and interdisciplinary graduate college programs in which UCMR members are involved: e.g. the EU sponsored Network of Excellence "EuroPathoGenomics" (web-page http://www.noe-epg.uni-wuerzburg.de/), the Umeå University-Washington University Science Exchange Program, as well as to national programs such as The Swedish National Network for Infection Biology. As the doctoral program develops, additional international and national links will be made with other universities and within our own university.

The UCMR vision is to establish a world-leading and sustainable science environment promoting cutting-edge biomedical research in molecular infection medicine at Umeå University. To do this, the UCMR consortium has initiated a chemical biology program to dissect molecular mechanisms of virulence in different microorganisms. Groups within this consortium are the pioneers in demonstrating the power of chemical biology in combination with molecular genetics to understand microbial virulence for the development of antimicrobials (see the review in Nature Chem Biol 3:541, 2007).

Chemical biology is emerging as a new means to obtain powerful tools to study complex biological systems. It includes a family of methods that utilize small organic molecules to alter the function of proteins directly rather than indirectly via gene mutations. These are powerful methods that allow the fine dissection of complex biological processes, such as microbial virulence, by identifying proteins, enzymes and receptors required for these processes. The theme of UCMR research is to combine chemical biology with our strong molecular biology program to solve modern day problems of microbial disease.

To sustain our vision in the future, the UCMR Research School will now begin training PhD students to work within a chemical biology curriculum. This program will offer new possibilities to stimulate graduate student training at the interface between biology-biomedicine-chemistry-physics. We anticipate that additional applications for small organic chemical molecules to study biological processes outside of microbial virulence will be included. This planned broadening of our program will lead to the development of a new curriculum for graduate studies within chemical biology.