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ISMB welcomes Nobel laureate to sixth research symposium

The programme covered all aspects of the Institute's research and included speakers from academic and research institutions around the world.

The Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology (ISMB) held its sixth biennial symposium in Birkbeck’s Clore Management Centre in June. The packed two-day scientific programme followed the pattern of previous symposia, featuring fifteen excellent lectures from both distinguished researchers and rising newcomers.

The programme covered all of the Institute’s research areas: structural biology, computational biology, biophysics, chemical biology and biochemistry with cell biology, plus the additional area of proteomics and mass spectrometry. The symposium was supported by both Birkbeck and UCL; it was opened by Geraint Rees, who will shortly to take on the role of Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences at UCL, and closed by Nicholas Keep, who holds an equivalent position at Birkbeck. Both deans paid tribute to the vision, energy and leadership of the Institute’s director, Gabriel Waksman.

Speaker highlights

For the first time in its 12-year history, the ISMB had the honour of welcoming a Nobel laureate, Venki Ramakrishnan, whose share of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded for structural studies of the ribosome. He described his most recent structure, the first high-resolution structure of the large subunit of a mitochondrial ribosome. The other external speaker on structural biology, Werner Kühlbrandt from Frankfurt, Germany, described the structure of a human ion transport protein and showed how the organisation of the mitochondrial membrane is disrupted during ageing. In an inspiring talk, Shankar Balasubramanian from the University of Cambridge, described how his research into DNA synthesis led to the development of a solid-state technique for DNA sequencing that is many orders of magnitude faster than those used in the 15-year long Human Genome Project. A number of other speakers also described research into nucleic acids and their interactions with proteins.

Read the full report [pdf] about speakers and their research by Dr Clare Sansom.

The next ISMB symposium is scheduled for June 2016.

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