Integrative Structural Biology tools for the study of protein-ligand interactions

Invited speakers and tutors:

Paul Adams, Berkeley, USA
Pavel Afonine, Berkeley, USA
Armando Albert, Madrid, Spain
Jose Maria Carazo, Madrid, Spain
Kay Diederichs, Konstanz, Germany
Paul Emsley, Cambridge, UK
Carmelo Giacovazzo, Bari, Italy
Xavier Gomis-Ruth, Barcelona, Spain
Juan Hermoso, Madrid, Spain
Eugene Krissinel, Oxford, UK
Rob Nicholls, Cambridge, UK
Maria Solá, Barcelona, Spain
Isabel Usón, Barcelona, Spain

Applicants:
The workshop has been designed for postgraduate, postdoctoral and research scientists that deal with macromolecular crystallography but need further knowledge on the routine uses and fundamentals that underlie the modern techniques for macromolecular crystallography. The topics will cover crystallographic computing and fundamentals using XDS, CCP4 and Phenix, as well as the state of the art on topics such as the strategies for protein production, phasing with ARCCIMBOLDO, SHELX and SIR2014, modeling with COOT and low resolution techniques. MCS2015 will provide five days and a half of lectures and workshops. The course is designed for 25 highly motivated students.

Requests to participate must be sent by a free-formated E-mail, before March 21, 2015 to the following address: [email protected], indicating the motivation to participate and including a letter of recommendation from PhD Director (only for PhD students).
Accepted participants will be notified by e-mail before April 4, 2015.

Organizers:
Armando Albert ([email protected] ), Juan Hermoso ([email protected]) and Xavier Gomis-Rüth ([email protected] )

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The Symposium is to be held at Levin Hall on the University of Texas Medical Branch Campus on Galveston Island

Speakers:

A. Keith Dunker, Indiana Univ. School of Med.Â

Lewis Kay, University of Toronto

Junji Iwahara, Univ. Texas Medical Branch

George Rose, Johns Hopkins University

Robert D. Wells, Texas A&M Health Science Center

Pores for thought: porous materials for greener energy and the environment

We will be holding a workshop on porous materials in Bali on 14th to 17th of February, 2015 under the Researcher Links scheme offered within the Newton Fund, the British Council, University of Bath and Institute Technology Bandung. The workshop is being coordinated by Dr. Asel Sartbaeva (University of Bath) and Dr. Rino Mukti (Institut Teknologi Bandung), and will have contributions from other leading researchers. We are now inviting Early Career Researchers from the UK and Indonesia to apply to attend this workshop. All travel and accommodation expenses will be covered by the Newton Researcher Links programme. The application form should be sent to Asel Sartbaeva ([email protected]) for UK participants and to Rino Mukti ([email protected]) for participants from Indonesia before the deadline of 15th of December, 2014.

Applications form and eligibility and selection criteria can be found here: http://www.bath.ac.uk/chemistry/contacts/academics/asel_sartbaeva/

The proposed school will compare and creatively confront different modern approaches to highly charged, structured, and disordered Coulomb systems. Its primary purpose will be to merge the different theoretical, experimental and simulation approaches in order to progress towards a unified description of the electrostatic interactions in soft- and bio-matter. An overview of approximate analytical theories as well as sophisticated simulations will put the students in contact with the state-of-the art research in biophysics and will allow them to build connections between these different theoretical approaches, as well as with the available experimental data.

Besides a poster session, attendants will be also invited to give short talks about their research activity. This school is aimed at graduate students and researchers in the fields of statistical mechanics, materials science, biophysics and nanobiotechnology. There is no registration fee and limited funds are available for travel and local expenses.

This school will be preceded on Sunday March 8 by a one-day minicourse by Prof. Jose Nelson Onochic (Rice University) on Energy Landscapes in Biophysics.

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Organizers / Lecturers:

Fernando Luís Barroso da Silva (USP-Ribeirão Preto, Brazil): On the peculiar electrostatic effects observed in protein systems â€" a computational approach

Roland Netz (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany): Hydration and dielectric effects at surfaces

Rudolf Podgornik (U. Ljubljana, Slovenia): Charge regulation and electrostatic interactions in proteins

Invited Lecturers:

Mathias Boström (University of Oslo, Norway): Hofmeister effects, Van der Waals forces and material modeling of cellulose in solution

Hernan Chaimovich (USP-São Paulo, Brazil): Trifluoromethane sulfonate as a surfactant counterion: properties and applications

Ralf Eichhorn (Nordita, Sweden): Theory of phoretic effects induced by the (counter-)ions in the system

Rosângela Itri (USP-São Paulo, Brazil): Protein interactions as revealed by small-angle x-ray scattering

Yan Levin (UFRGS, Brazil): Introduction to statistical mechanics of charged systems

João Ruggiero Neto (UNESP-Rio Preto, Brazil): Electrostatic and non-electrostatic features in the interaction of lytic peptides with model membranes

Jose Nelson Onuchic (Rice Univ.):Â Onuchic Minicourse on Energy Landscapes in Biophysics

Main topics

• Biomedicine crystallography
• Nanocrystallography
• Membrane protein crystallization
• Advanced crystallization
• Crystallization in education

The PVA Conference on Phage/Virus Assembly is a continuation of a series that was initiated in 1968. At first it was a meeting of scientists working on mechanisms of bacteriphage assembly, it expanded to include animal and plant viruses. The conference alternates with the FASEB Virus Assembly meeting.

At present the Conference is highly interdisciplinary, bringing together virologists, geneticists, biochemists, biophysicists and structural biologists working on various aspects of virus assembly and virus infection, including medically relevant viruses and archaeal viruses.

The value of training and support the new generation of researchers in virus assembly is a priority of the Conference.

Organiser : Petr Leiman, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL)

A Science and Society 2015 lecture by Dr Harren Jhoti, President & CEO, Astex Pharmaceuticals (Cambridge)

Dr Harren Jhoti co-founded Astex in 1999 and was Chief Scientific Officer until 2007 when he was appointed Chief Executive. During its development, Astex successfully raised more than £50 million from US and European venture capitalists and established multiple alliances with major pharmaceutical companies such as Novartis, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline.

As part of these alliances, Astex applied its proprietary Fragment-Based Drug Discovery technology to generate novel drug candidates for patients with cancer and other life-threatening diseases. In 2013 Astex was acquired by Otsuka Pharmaceuticals for $886 million, one of the largest transactions in UK Biotechnology, and now operates as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Otsuka.

In 2007 Dr Jhoti was named by the Royal Society of Chemistry as 'Chemistry World Entrepreneur of the Year' and was awarded the Prous Institute-Overton and Meyer Award for New Technologies in Drug Discovery by the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry in 2012.

But before being a successful chemist and business man, Dr Jhoti had interrupted his studies to start a rock band. During the talk, he will tell about his determination to succeed after his failed attempt at becoming a rock star.

Tickets for the event can be obtained from

https://www.liv.ac.uk/events/science-and-society/form.php

Conference topics include but are not limited to:

1. Smart biomaterials
2. Surface modification and functionalization
3. Advanced manufacturing
4. Antimicrobial surfaces and materials
5. Biointerfaces
6. Bioimaging and biosensing
7. Tissue engineering / Regenerative medicine
8. Angiogenesis / Vascularization
9. Drug and gene delivery
10. Cell encapsulation and delivery
11. Stem cells
12. Cancer therapy
13. Bone and cartilage
14. Neural regeneration
15. Cardiovascular applications
16. Wound healing
17. Clinical trials
18. Translation and commercialization

Breaking Barriers to Go Beyond Structure: Describing Functional States and Biological Context

Preliminary Program

• Biological Cutting Edge Methodologies Across Scales
  (Eva Nogales / David Baker / Xiaowei Zhuang)
• Image Analysis and Validation Strategies for Heterogeneous Samples
  (Helen Saibil / Nikolaus Grigorieff / John Rubinstein)
• Structure in the Cellular Context
  (Wolfgang Baumeister / Elizabeth Villa / Daniela Nicastro)
• Interpretation and Validation of Low-Medium Resolution Cryo-EM Structures
  (Hong-Wei Wang / Gabriel Lander / Carolyn Moores)
• Selected Poster Presentations: Recent Advances in Cryo-EM Technical Development
  (Edward Egelman)
• Strategies for Atomic Modeling of High-Resolution Cryo-EM Structures
  (Steve Harrison / Paul Adams / Axel Brunger / Frank Dimaio / Simon Jennings / Alan Brown)
• Improving Sample Preparation
  (Holger Stark / Bridget Carragher / Robert Glaeser / Lori Passmore)
• Development and Use of Correlative Methodologies
  (Grant Jensen / Kay Gruenewald)
• Selected Poster Presentations: Recent Advances in the Application of Cryo-EM Methodology
  (Yifan Cheng)