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First Annual UK-Southeast USA Symposium
The First Annual UK-Southeast USA Symposium on Structural
Genomics and Proteomics of Membrane and Metalloproteins was held at the
University of Georgia on October 13-17. Bi-Cheng Wang (UGA) served as
Organizing Chair. The meeting attracted about 100 participants from the
southeast as well as participants from the UK, Japan and China. This
symposium was created to expand international communications in structural
genomics and proteomics, extend the boundary of crystallography and
increase gene-to-structure capabilities in these areas.
After the arrival of international visitors, participants enjoyed an
opening reception at the UGA Atlanta Alumni Center welcomed by former UGA
VP of Research, Gordhan Patel (retired) and British Consul-General Martin
Rickerd. Guests then traveled to Athens for the scientific sessions, which
were held at The University of Georgia Center for Continuing Education.
On October 14, the inaugural ceremony was opened by UGA President, Michael
F. Adams, followed by comments from C. Michael Cassidy, President of the
Georgia Research Alliance and British Consul-General Martin Rickerd. The
scientific talks were divided into five sessions: Genomics & Proteomics,
Bioinformatics, Cloning & Expression, Mass Spectrometry and Biophysical
Tools & Data Management. The first session was chaired by Bi-Cheng Wang,
who opened with an introduction and overview of current challenges in the
fields of structural genomics and proteomics, followed by talks from Jim
Naismith (Univ. of St. Andrews) and Seiki Kuramitsu (RIKEN), which focused
on their experience in these fields and techniques used to reach the goals
in their perspective funded projects. The session on Cloning & Expression
was chaired by Jim Hartley (NCI/SAIC) who gave an overview on proteomics
screening methods, followed by a presentation by Peter Horanyi (UGA)
outlining the advantages of a novel parallel protein expression technique,
and Steve Baldwin’s (Univ. of Leeds) overview of membrane protein
expression in the genomic era. Lance Wells (UGA) provided some insight
into the field of Mass Spectrometry, describing tandem mass spectrometry
approaches used in his laboratory for the study of glycoproteins. A
session on Biophysical Tools and Data Management, chaired by Laurence
Barron (Univ. of Glasgow), wrapped up the first day of talks. Barron
focused his talk on Raman Optical Activity and its usefulness in protein
structure analysis, followed by presentations from Anne Pajon (EMBI) on a
laboratory information system designed for the BBSRC SPoRT Initiative and
C.W. Yong (CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory), who described how to make the best
use of high performance computers for molecular dynamics and quantum
mechanical pictures.
The second day of the symposium included sessions on Membrane Proteins,
Metalloproteins and Crystallomics & Crystallography. The Membrane Protein
session, chaired by Neil Isaacs (Univ. of Glasgow) and Larry DeLucas (UAB)
began with a report on the Membrane Protein Structure Initiative (Mpsi) in
the UK by Neil Isaacs. Larry DeLucas followed with an overview of novel
crystallization techniques for membrane proteins, and David Puett (UGA)
gave a presentation on G protein-coupled receptors. Two important
contributors to this session, Zihe Rao (Chinese Academy of Sciences/Tsinghua
Univ.) and Steve Sligar (UIUC) were unable to attend due to extenuating
circumstances. Dawei Lin (UGA) filled in on short notice, giving a report
on accurate detection of protein domain boundaries. The Metalloproteins
session, chaired by Samar Hasnain (CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory) and Robert
Scott (UGA) began with some examples from Samar Hasnain on using combined
X-ray approaches to study the functions and misfunctions of
metalloproteins. Robert Scott followed with a report on X-ray spectroscopy
in post-genomic biology, David Richardson (Univ. of East Anglia) gave a
description of the structural resolution of the nitrogen cycle respirome,
and Gary Sawers (John Innes Centre) ended the session with an overview on
the maturation of metalloproteins. The last session, Crystallomics &
Crystallography, chaired by John Rose (UGA), focused on novel techniques
in these fields. John Rose gave a talk on a high-throughput
crystallization pipeline for structural genomics applications developed
for SECSG. Svetlana Antonyuk (CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory) illustrated how
cryo-annealing methods can be used to diffract crystals to atomic
resolution, which has greatly increased the understanding of
metalloprotein structure based mechanisms. Martin Caffrey (OSU/Univ. of
Limerick) followed with a presentation on crystallizing membrane proteins
in lipidic mesophases, and Joseph Ng (UAH) described the fundamentals of
counter-diffusion as compared to traditional crystallization methods and
its use in structural genomics. The day ended with a talk by Xiaodong
Cheng (Emory Univ) focusing on five different structural folds of
SAM-dependent methyltransferases and their involvement in membrane and/or
metal (zinc) binding.
The last day of the symposium focused on tools and methodology for current
and future use in genomics and proteomics. Talks were divided into three
sessions: High-Throughput & Novel Methods, Scientific Aspects of New
Diffraction Equipment and Next Generation Macromolecular Crystallography
Methods. The first session, chaired by Zhi-Jie (James) Liu (UGA), began
with his overview of the high-throughput structure determination pipelines
at SECSG. Peng (George) Wang (OSU) followed with a talk on the mechanism
of polysaccharide synthesis, which he termed the “last frontier on the
biosynthesis of biopolymers.” The first session ended with Robert Yu’s
(MCG) presentation on glycomics and glycolipidomics, which focused on the
use of mass spectrometry in conjuction with proteomics/genomics to analyze
complex glycoforms. The second session, chaired by John Chrzas
(SER-CAT/UGA), was opened with an overview of the SER-CAT beamlines
presented by Chrzas and Bi-Cheng Wang (SER-CAT Director). The remainder of
the session focused on equipment options and included presentations from
Jules Hendrix (Marresearch) on the mar555 flat panel detector, a
description of a new high speed, large area photon-counting detector by
Roger Durst (Bruker AXS), and a talk by Joe Ferrara (Rigaku Americas) on
advances in SAD phasing in the home lab. The third session began with a
talk by Zhi-Jie (James) Liu (UGA) on the novel technique of sulfur phasing
in crystallography, followed by Zheng-Qing (Albert) Fu’s (UGA)
presentation on SGXPro, a user friendly computation environment developed
for protein crystallography. Ming Luo (UAB) ended the session with an
overview of a proteomic platform for expression of higher eukaryotic
proteins, where he described how his group investigated over 10,000 open
reading frames (ORFs) from C. elegans and human genomes through a robotic
pipeline.
After the third day of talks, participants attended a poster session
including contributions from junior and senior researchers as well as UGA
graduate students. In conjunction with the poster session was a vendor
show and an interactive demonstration of SER-CAT Remote Access, which
combines AccessGrid (computer conference technology) with robotics at the
SER-CAT beamlines to provide remote site participation by its users.
The symposium ended with a banquet featuring keynote speaker, Arnett Mace,
Provost and Senior Vice President of the University of Georgia.
Participants also enjoyed some lively bluegrass music, pork barbeque and
catfish with all the fixings served up southern style.
Following the symposium was a meeting of the Organizing and Program
Committees, who all agreed the meeting was a worthwhile endeavor and
served to form international collaborations to further benefit the field
of structural proteomics. While the term “First Annual” is certainly
optimistic, in this case it was quite fitting as it was agreed to host the
“Second Annual” UK-Southeast USA Symposium at the University of St.
Andrews in Scotland in August 2006.
The symposium was a joint effort of the University of Georgia and the
British Consulate and was sponsored in part by Rigaku Americas, Xenocs,
Bruker AXS, Qiagen/Nextal, MarUSA, Marresearch, The Center for Biophysical
Sciences and Engineering at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and
the President’s Venture Fund through the generous gifts of the University
of Georgia Partners. More details including abstracts are available at
www.bmb.uga.edu/uk-seusa.
Submitted by Lisa Horanyi,
University of Georgia
Originally submitted to the American Crystallographic
Association Newsletter, November 2005.
Please contact the author regarding
submission to other publications. |
