2011 Proteins

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Funds are requested to support the 2011 Proteins Gordon Research Conference to be held at the Holderness School in New Hampshire, June 19-24. This is a long-standing and usually oversubscribed meeting that serves the scientific community and is focused on the fundamental properties of protein molecules, including their structure, folding, dynamics, stability, and interactions. In the Gordon Conference tradition, we will meet in a small setting with plenty of time for discussion and casual interactions that lead to new ideas and research directions. The prior 2009 meeting was oversubscribed and survey results placed it in the "high performing" category of Gordon Conferences. The meeting is being organized by chairs James Bowie (UCLA) and Patricia Clarke (Notre Dame) and vice-chairs Bertrand Garcia-Moreno (Hopkins) and Amy Keating (MIT), who have all collaborated to put together the initial program. We believe the program reflects the diversity of protein science in terms of topics (theory, design, folding, membrane proteins, cellular assemblies), gender (half the organizers and nearly 40% of the speakers are women), region (speakers from all regions of the US and three non US speakers), age group (20% early career speakers) and ethnicity (an organizer and at least one speaker from underrepresented minorities). We have included space for a large number (11) talks that will be selected from posters which will certainly allow us to increase the fraction of early career speakers and we will further consciously seek to bolster the diversity of speakers by this mechanism. The meeting will be bookended with keynote talks by David Agard (UCSF), a pioneer in the study of macromolecular structure and Susan Lindquist (MIT), a leader in the field of amyloids. We plan regular sessions covering the following topics: Large Cellular Assemblies, Protein Folding, Design and Engineering, Protein Aggregation/Amyloidogenesis, Protein Biogenesis, Dynamics and Synthetic/Chemical Biology. We have little doubt that the conference will be of interest to a wide swath of the protein scientists and is likely expose all the participants to topics and ideas they do not regularly wrestle with. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: including health-related significance Proteins are central actors in most biological processes, including those relevant to human health. Proteins are involved in such important biological processes as signaling pathways, metabolism, and gene expression that go awry in disease states. Protein mutation, misfolding or dysfunction is directly implicated in many diseases. Thus, proteins are the usual targets of drugs use to combat disease. The 2011 Proteins GRC will explore recent advances and future trends in understanding the structure, stability, motions, and interactions of protein molecules and how these fundamental properties impact function in biological and medical contexts. New pathways to therapeutic tools will also be a major focus.