Once again I wanted to draw everyone's attention to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory 2012 X-ray Methods in Structural Biology course which will take place October 15 through October 30, 2012.
The official course announcement is here: http://meetings.cshl.edu/courses/c-crys12.shtml I think the course is an outstanding place to learn both the theoretical and practical aspects of Macromolecular Crystallography because of the extensive lectures from world-renowned teachers and the hands-on experiments. Just recently, David Piston of Vanderbilt noted ("Understanding how it works" (2012) Nature 484, pp 440-441) that "We need to do a better job of teaching students how techniques work before they start using them.” The CSHL course has tried to do that since it was first held in 1988 25 years ago when Alex McPherson, Hans Deisenhofer, Alwyn Jones, and Jim Remington joined me for 2 weeks of fun and hard work. This year's course will see the return of the long-time instruction team of Alex McPherson, Gary Gilliland, Bill Furey and myself along with many talented experts to help us give the participants an experience in Macromolecular Crystallography learning that cannot be found anywhere else. (The student:teacher ratio ends up to be about 1:1). We expect to have the participants crystallize several proteins and determine their structures all in about two weeks. The course is limited to 16 participants due to the very hands-on nature of the experiments and the intimate seminar room. Please check the above web site for more details. If anyone has any questions, please send me e-mail, I will be happy to answer all queries. Jim
