Heart of Europe Bio-Crystallography

The Third Heart of Europe Bio-Crystallography Meeting (HEC) took place at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Poznan in September 2000. The HEC meetings are annual three-day workshops of structural biology and crystallography groups located in central Europe (Czech Republic, East Germany, and Poland). This year Mariusz Jaskolski, U. of Poznan, organized an exciting meeting with a well-balanced schedule of presentations and ample room for extensive discussions. All correspondence with the 55 participants and announcements were handled over the internet (www.man.poznan.pl/~jabies/HEC/).

The emphasis of the meeting was to give young scientists, PhD students and postdocs the chance to present their research to a larger scientific community and to meet with peers to discuss practical crystallographic issues. The 25 oral presentations spanned areas from protein production, crystallization, phasing and crystallographic refinement to the analysis of atomic resolution crystal structures. The keynote speaker, George Sheldrick (U. of Göttingen), talked about structure refinement and applications of ab initio structure determination methods in biological crystallography using the SHELX program suite.

Although participation is limited geographically, the number of groups involved continues to increase substantially each year, reflecting the growth of structural biology in the center of Europe. The fourth HEC meeting is scheduled to take place in the Czech Republic during the autumn of 2001, hosted by Jindrich Hasek and Juraj Sedlacek.

Participants of the Third Heart of Europe Bio-Crystallography Meeting in Poznan, Poland.