Biochemical Society / Wellcome Trust Focused Meeting on "Protein Evolution - sequences, structures and systems"
Oral communication slots are available at this meeting. All attendees, particularly researchers in the early stages of their career, are invited to submit a poster abstract for consideration as an oral communication.
Abstract submission deadline: 21 November 2008
Abstract submission is now closed. If you wish to bring a poster to the meeting, please contact meetings@biochemistry.org
Earlybird registration deadline: 19 December 2008
Registration is now closed. If you wish to attend the meeting please contact
meetings@biochemistry.org.
Student and Young Researcher bursaries, sponsored by BioSapiens are available for this meeting. Please complete the application form. Deadline: 16 January 2009.
This meeting is planned to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and will focus on the insights into evolution which have been obtained from the study of protein sequences, structures and systems.
It is just over 50 years since the sequence of insulin was determined and since then a vast new source of biological information at the molecular level has been revealed providing insights into evolution which complement and augment studies at the organism level upon which the theory of evolution was developed. Today, we have the complete sequences for hundreds of genomes and partial information from numerous organisms in the environment (metagenomics). From this pool of information we are obtaining a far more detailed understanding of the phylogenetic relationship between species.
The three-dimensional structures for around 20,000 proteins have been determined to near atomic resolution. The similarity of protein structure can be used to probe further back in evolution since structure tends to be more conserved than sequence. The complex inter-relationship between the evolution of protein function and structure provides further insight into the evolution of the protein universe.
A major development over the last ten years has been the development of omics methodologies which reveal at a global level the organization of biological networks. The evolution of biological systems will be discussed.
Proceedings (invited speakers) will be published in Biochemical Society Transactions
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