Meeting Report: ACA, ISMB, BSR, and ACS

Thanks to everyone who stopped by the RCSB PDB exhibit booth at the American Crystallographic Association's Annual Meeting (ACA; July 21-26 in Salt Lake City, UT) for demonstrations of the RCSB PDB website and discussions about the remediated data. We also appreciate those who came by the poster Remediation of the PDB Archive.

The session Informatics in Structural Biology, organized by John Westbrook (RCSB PDB) and Kim Henrick (MSD-EBI), focused on the applications of structural informatics and inspired a lot of interesting conversations.

Annotator Jasmine Young's presentation at the Fun Lectures for Young Scientists symposium is described in this newsletter.

The RCSB PDB's Jasmine Young and Huanwang Yang
with Brian Samas (Pfizer) at a poster session.

Demonstrations of the RCSB PDB website and the Art of Science exhibit were held at the 15th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) & 6th European Conference on Computational Biology.

The Art of Science exhibit was part of the ISMB meeting.
Special thanks to the ISMB's Steven Leard, BJ Morrison, and Burkhard
Rost for their support and help with the exhibit and the poster prize.

A poster about the BioSync resource (biosync.rcsb.org) was presented at the 9th International Conference on Biology and Synchrotron Radiation (BSR) by Judith L. Flippen-Anderson (August 13-17, 2007; Manchester, UK).

At the American Chemical Society's National Meeting, annotator Shuchismita Dutta presentated a poster about the information contained in the Remediated Chemical Component Dictionary for the wwPDB and how the dictionary was used by the wwPDB to help remediate the PDB archive (August 19-23, 2007; Boston, MA)

Shuchismita Dutta at the ACS Meeting

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Art of Science Update

The Art of Science is a traveling exhibit of images from the RCSB PDB website and the Molecule of the Month.

This exhibit was recently hosted by the International Society for Computational Biology at the ISMB meeting. The show also was on display from September 25 - October 5 at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. That show was sponsored by the Molecular Biophysics Graduate Program, and presented in conjunction with the Molecular Biophysics' Meet the Program Poster Presentations.

If you would be interested in sponsoring this exhibit at your institution, please let us know at info@rcsb.org.

The Art of Science also includes works by the protein sculptor
Julian Voss-Andreae including this sculpture of a piece of a
virus shell. For more information about Julian, please read the
Winter 2007 RCSB PDB Newsletter's Community Focus.
Shown is Virus Capsid (2003, Cast and fabricated bronze, length 9").

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2007 RCSB PDB Poster Prizes Awarded at ACA, ISMB, and ECM

Thanks to everyone who participated in the recent RCSB PDB Poster Prize competitions. The best student posters related to macromolecular crystallography at the American Crystallographic Association's Annual Meeting and the European Crystallographic Meeting, and the best student poster in the Structure and Function Prediction category at the ISMB meeting were awarded with a subscription to Science and a related book.

The prize will also be awarded at the Asian Crystallographic Association meeting later this year.

ISMB (July 19-25, 2007; Vienna, Austria)

Keren Lasker

Keren Lasker for "Determining the configuration of macromolecular assembly components based on cryoEM density fitting and pairwise geometric complementarity" (Keren Lasker, Tel Aviv University and University of California, San Francisco; Maya Topf, Birkbeck College, University of London; Andrej Sali, University of California, San Francisco; Haim Wolfson, Tel Aviv University).

Judges: Yanay Ofran (Columbia University), Predrag Radivojac (Indiana University), Alejandro Giorgetti (University of Rome), Riccardo Percudani (Universita di Parma), Michael Tress (Spanish National Cancer Research Centre), and Sean Mooney (Indiana University School of Medicine).

Poster Prize Chairman: Marco Punta (University of Georgia)

ACA (July 21-26, 2007; Salt Lake City, UT)

Hasan Demirci

Hasan Demirci for "Structure Based Protein Enginering of Ribosomal Protein Trimethyltransferase" (Hasan Demirci, Steven T. Gregory, Albert E. Dahlberg, Gerwald Jogl. Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biochemistry, Brown University).

Judges: Mitchell J. Guss (University of Sydney), Peter Horanyi (University of Virginia), Thomas Koetzle (Argonne National Laboratory), James Phillips (Duke University Medical Center), Bernard Santarsiero (University of Illinois at Chicago), and Timothy Umland (Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute)

Poster Prize Chairman: John Rose (University of Georgia)

ECM (August 22-27, 2007; Marrakech, Morroco)

Humberto Couto Fernandes

Humberto Couto Fernandes for "Yellow lupine pathogenesis-related protein as a reservoir for cytokinins" (Humberto Fernandes, Anna Bujacz, Oliwia Pasternak, Grzegorz Bujacz, Michal Sikorski, Mariusz Jaskólski, Center for Biocrystallographic Research, Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poznan, Poland).

Judges: Alexander Wlodawer (National Cancer Institute at Frederick), Wolfram Saenger (Freie Universitaet Berlin), Vilmos Fulop (University of Warwick), Tomitake Tsukihara (Osaka University)

Poster Prize Chairman: Anders Liljas (Lund University)

Special thanks to John Helliwell and Petra Bombicz for their help with organizing the prize at this meeting.

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Molecules of the Quarter