Conferences
Novel Enzymes 2010
April 2010
More information to follow soon
South West Structual Biology Consortium (SWSBC 2008)
31st March - 1st April 2008
Following the tradition of the previous SWSBC Meetings we would like to welcome you to Exeter, UK for ‘SWSBC 2008’.
The conference is an annual event, which circulates around the Universities in the South West UK who have an interest in all aspects of structural biology. Previous meetings have been held in Exeter, Bath, Bristol, Reading, Southampton and Portsmouth with generous sponsorship from CCP4. The programme will consist of an invited outside lecture, short oral presentations from academics/postdocs and PhD students from the Universities in the South West of the UK and poster sessions.The meeting will be held on the University of Exeter Campus. Its natural setting in parkland, woodland, lakes and gardens gives it the justifiable reputation as 'probably the most attractive campus in Britain'. It has first-class accommodation and conference facilities. It is anticipated that at least 100 academic and industrial participants are expected representing leading edge research and business opportunities in the area of structural biology.
PROSTAB 2007
11-14 April 2007
Following the tradition of the previous International Conferences on Protein Stability we would like to welcome you to Exeter, UK for 'ProStab 2007'.
The city of Exeter (pop. c100,000) is the regional capital of the South West of England and is consistently rated one of the best places to live in the UK. It is surrounded by the beaches, National Parks and attractive countryside which make Devon and Cornwall one of Europe's top holiday destinations. The city itself was settled two hundred years before the arrival of the Romans and this long heritage can be seen in many parts of Exeter, including its medieval cathedral and the historic quayside which was once the scene for a thriving international port exporting woollen cloth.
The meeting will be held on the University of Exeter Campus. Its natural setting in parkland, woodland, lakes and gardens gives it the justifiable reputation as 'probably the most attractive campus in Britain'. It has first-class accommodation and conference facilities.
You will be assured of a 'warm' welcome to Exeter University and its surrounding region. The city of Bath with its famous Roman baths and hot waters are only a short distance away. You may also be interested in visiting Cornwall which is the furthest SW of the UK and is surrounded by spectacular coastline and famous for its gardens including the Eden Project. Exeter is easily reached by train (2hours 30 minutes from central London), the M5 motorway and regional airports at Exeter and Bristol.
History
The Section on Applied Biocatalysis (ESAB) and its predecessor the Working Party on Applied Biocatalysis (WPAB) co-organized several conferences focused on the stability and stabilization of biocatalysts/proteins but with different titles.
Stability and Stabilization of Enzymes, Maastrict, 1992
Stability and Stabilization of Biocatalysts, Cordoba, 1998
International Conference on Protein Stabilization:
Leeds, UK, 1998
Lisbon, Portugal, 2000
Toulouse, France, 2002
Bratislava, Slovakia, 2004
Exeter, UK, 2007
RSC Frontiers in Chemical Biology: Mechanistic Enzymology and Biocatalysis
31 August - 2 September 2005
www.rsc.org/MEB05
All living cells contain an abundance of enzymes that are able to catalyse the many different reactions necessary for life. These proteins have evolved over many decades to work efficiently and with great stereoselectivity for their specific function and reaction conditions.
A continuing wealth of information is available from both human and other genome sequencing projects that provides the coding regions, regulatory elements and sequence information for these enzymes. The many international structural genomic programmes are providing information on enzyme structure, mechanism and evolution. This information can be used to understand the relationship between protein structure and function and how enzyme mechanisms have evolved. It also provides great advantages for medicine. Many diseases are directly or indirectedly related to mutations in key enzymes impairing their function and activity. An understanding of enzyme structure and mechanism is being used for rational drug design.
We are still not in a position to understand the folding of the protein chain from its primary sequence. It is possible to recognise specific amino acid ‘motifs’ and to model an unknown protein structure using a related known structure as a model. This can be reliably carried out if the two amino acid sequences have over 40% sequence homology. A number of new enzyme folds and catalytic mechanisms continue to be discovered.
A detailed understanding of enzyme mechanism still demands a multidisciplinary approach from both chemists and biologists. It is important to maintain and support this area of chemical and structural biology.
Enzymes can be particularly useful to compliment traditional chemical methodology for new drug synthesis in the pharmaceutical industry. Enzymes carry out their reactions under milder conditions and their inherent stereoselectivity has obvious advantages for novel chiral drug production. One important example of this is the use of a gamma lactamase enzyme to produce the optically pure (-) gamma lactam used for a range of carbocyclic nucleotides that have antiviral properties. These include new anti-HIV drugs that inhibit the viral reverse transcriptase enzyme that copies the viral RNA into DNA during its infection and reproductive cycle.
To be used industrially enzymes need to be robust and often stable in the organic solvents required for an industrial process. This has lead to the use of naturally stable enzymes found in thermophilic microorganisms. These enzymes can be cloned and over-expressed in more easily grown hosts such as Escherichia coli. Once cloned the gene can be evolved either rationally or by a directed approach in order to change the protein’s substrate specificity or properties that are required for a specific biotransformation process. Knowledge of the structure and detailed mechanism of the enzyme can help to achieve these aims in a rational manner.
The RSC Frontiers Meeting on Mechanistic Enzymology to be held in Exeter from the 31 st of August to the 2 nd September 2005 will address many of these issues and will bring together an International group of experts who will present papers ranging from enzyme structure and mechanism to the industrial application of enzymes for biocatalytic processes. This will be an exciting meeting that will bring together multidisciplinary scientists from academia and industry. The meeting will take place over 3 days at the end of August and beginning of September, which is an ideal time to visit the South West of England. The first two sessions will cover the use of biophysical and biochemical techniques in combination with molecular biology to understand the details of enzyme mechanisms. The latter two sessions will address how this knowledge can be used to evolve new enzymes with improved properties and altered substrate specificities. It will also address the use of enzymes either alone or in combination with traditional chemical synthesis for industrial biotransformations.
|
