FEBS Journal award

Nicole LaRonde-LeBlanc, a postdoctoral fellow in the Macromolecular Crystallography Lab., National Cancer Inst. (Frederick, MD, USA), was awarded the 2005 FEBS Journal Prize for Young Scientists. She was the first author of a paper entitled “Structure and activity of the atypical serine kinase Rio1” (N. LaRonde-LeBlanc, T. Guszczynski, T. Copeland, A. Wlodawer, FEBS Journal 272, 3698-3713, 2005), judged by the editors of the Journal to be “the best published in the journal in 2005 that falls within the rules for our FEBS Journal Prize for Young Scientists.” The prize includes a check for 10,000€, as well as an all-expenses-paid travel to the 31^st Congress of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies, held in Istambul, Turkey, in June 2006 where she presented there her work on determining the crystal structure and autophosphorylation sites of Rio1, a novel kinase involved in ribosome biogenesis and cell cycle progression. Rio1 and related kinases may become important new targets for designing anticancer drugs.