Symposium on Electron Crystallography of Macromolecules at Granlibakken Conference Center in Lake Tahoe, California

该奖项为1998年12月9日至12日在加利福尼亚州太浩湖Granlibakken会议中心举行的大分子电子结晶学研讨会提供了部分支持。这次研讨会的动机是基于结构生物学领域的最新进展，该领域能够在3-10埃的分辨率范围内解析生物结构细节。研讨会将集中于电子结晶学的四个分支的最新显著进展，强调方法学的发展和大分子组装中分子间相互作用的阐明。将特别关注晶体单分子层中的蛋白质--包括膜组成部分和非膜蛋白质；通过将高分辨率亚基结构拟合到完整复合体的较低分辨率图中来探索分子间的相互作用；以亚纳米分辨率分析细丝和独立粒子；以及基于EM派生的分子包膜和非晶体对称性对本地X射线数据进行相分析的新方法。研讨会的目标是总结这些和相关的研究路线，评估进一步改进方法的前景(更高的分辨率，加速分析)，并鼓励将其应用于更广泛的一系列生物学问题。本次研讨会的另一个重要目的是向细胞和分子生物学社区传播这一新兴的结构生物学工具。主办方将试图通过各种宣传研讨会的方式吸引非结构生物学学科的与会者参加这次会议，并将其安排在1998年旧金山细胞生物学年会之前。为了更广泛地传播，计划在《结构生物学杂志》上出版一期特刊，介绍受邀与会者提供的设想专题。

This award provides partial support for a Symposium on Electron Crystallography of Macromolecules at Granlibakken Conference Center in Lake Tahoe, California, between December 9-12, 1998. The motivation of this symposium is to be based on the recent advances in this field of structural biology capable of resolving biological structure details at 3-10 angstrom resolution range. The Symposium will focus on recent dramatic advances in four branches of electron crystallography, emphasizing both methodology development and the elucidation of inter-molecular interactions in large macromolecular assemblies. Particular attention will be paid to proteins - both integral membrane components and non-membrane proteins - in crystalline monolayers; probing inter-molecular interactions by fitting high resolution subunit structures into lower resolution maps of intact complexes; analysis of filaments and free-standing particles at subnanometer resolution; and a novel method of phasing native X-ray data based on exploiting EM-derived molecular envelopes and non-crystallographic symmetry. The goal of the Symposium is to summarize these and related lines of investigation, assess the prospects for further methodological improvement (higher resolution, accelerated analysis), and stimulate their application to a more extensive set of biological problems. Another important purpose of this Symposium is to disseminate this emerging structural biology tool to the cell and molecular biology community. The organizers will make an attempt to attract participants from non structural biology discipline attending this meeting via a variety of means of advertising the Symposium and scheduling it right before the 1998 Cell Biology Annual Conference to be held in San Francisco. For a broader dissemination, it is planned to publish a special issue of the envisaged topics in the Journal of Structural Biology contributed from the invited participants.