Dear colleagues, On behalf of the organizing committee I am pleased to call for poster abstracts for the 2009 NIGMS Workshop on Enabling Technologies for Structural Biology. On March 4-6, 2009 our annual Protein Structure Initiative workshop (a.k.a. the "Bottlenecks") will be held in the Natcher Conference Center on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The organizers have chosen to broaden the focus of the meeting in order to attract the attendance and participation of a wider cross section of the structural biology community. The adjusted moniker for the meeting is intended to suggest this. Within the two and one half day format of the meeting posters and oral presentations will cover the full range of technical barriers to the determination of protein structure by focused investigator(s) or high throughput pipelines.
The detailed program for the workshop is currently under development. The present outline includes a keynote presentations by Professors Michael Rossmann and Frank Raushel and six topical sessions entitled "Protein-Protein Interactions and Complexes", "Technologies for Functional Studies", "Homology Modeling for Experimentalists", "Problems and Solutions (formerly 'Traditional Bottlenecks') ", "New and Improved Technologies", "Combined Approaches" and a poster session. Additionally, there will be a half day devoted to extended pedagogical presentations. The current thinking by the organizers is that two (or potentially more) parallel sessions will be devoted to extended discussions (perhaps 60 minutes or longer) of PSI technologies which are "ready for prime time". The objective in these sessions is to expose the attending structural biology community, unfamiliar with the Protein Structure Initiative, to some of the valuable products of the PSI effort. As in past workshops the platform program will rely heavily on poster abstracts promoted to the oral program. Meeting organizers will work to produce a balance among presentations without a strong prejudgment on which areas of enquiry will be included. Selection of those promoted talks will be on the basis of interest and impact. As in last years program, space for Center "overview" posters will be available to groups participating in the PSI2 research network. The organizers hope to stimulate, as we have in past workshops, the freest and most energetic exchange at this workshop among participants at all levels. While our Initiative continues to be focused on the issues of the day in high throughput protein structure determination we look forward to including the structural biology community at large in discussions of the development and application of broadly applicable methods and techniques. As in past workshops we hope that all (or at least most) attendees will participate in the workshop by co-authorship in at least one poster. The deadline for the submission of abstracts for this meeting is February 11, 2009. Submitted abstracts will be reviewed by the organizing committee and authors who have been selected for inclusion in the oral program will be notified within about one week, in no case later than February 23, 2009. Logistical and organizational details will be provided on the meeting registration website early in the New Year: http://meetings.nigms.nih.gov/index.cfm?event=home&ID=4931 If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me or a member of the organizing committee. /Organizing Committee/ Michael Malkowski Celia Goulding Brian Fox Ashley Deacon Stephen Anderson Charles G. Edmonds, Ph.D. Program Director Cell Biology and Biophysics Division National Institute of General Medical Sciences Building 45, Room 2As-13K Bethesda, MD 20892-6200 (301) 594-4428 (voice) (301) 480-2004 (FAX) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
