North American SMALP Conference 2017
This conference focuses on applications of polymer nanodiscs in membrane protein research
Location: Koshland Hall, University of Berkeley, California, USA
Date: Friday March 24, 2017 from 9am-5pm
Conference info and sign up: http://www.smalp.net/meetings.html
Speakers
Melanie Cocco, Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at the University of California, Irvine, studies membrane protein structure and vaccine formulations, and will present Amphipols as solubilizing agents for membrane protein vaccines.
Tim Dafforn, Professor of Biotechnology at the University of Birmingham and Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, co-invented the SMALP system for research into membrane proteins by methods including SANS, SAXS and cEM.
Yuan Gao, PhD candidate at the University of California, San Francisco and is studying membrane protein structural biology, he worked on TRPV1 ion channel mechanisms, as reported this year in Nature, and will present Combining single particle cryo-EM with lipid nanodisc.
Tim Knowles, Lecturer at the School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham and co-inventor of the SMALP system. He uses NMR and small angle X-ray and neutron scattering to study protein complexes including the beta barrel assembly machine (BAM) found in gram negative bacterial outer membranes.
Tomas Laursen, Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Joint BioEnergy Institute, uses SMA to solubilize and isolate a membrane anchored dynamic protein complex, the dhurrin metabolon, as is appearing in Science. He will speak on SMALPs: the “cutting” edge of membrane protein studies.
Michael Overduin, Professor, Department of Biochemistry at the University of Alberta is developing amphipathic polymers to solubilize and study native membrane protein complexes including novel targets for infectious disease and cancer.
Henrik Vibe Scheller, Director of Cell Wall Biosynthesis at UC-Berkeley has interests in the structure and function of glycosyltransferases, nucleotide sugar transporters and regulatory proteins involved in glycan biosynthesis.
Anton Allen Abbotsford Smith, PostDoc at University of California, Berkeley, with interests in polymer synthesis, conjugates and nanomaterials for applications including drug delivery; he will present on Expanded opportunities with SMA through controlled polymerizations and functionalization.
Roger Sunahara, Professor at University of California, San Diego studying G protein-couplied receptors structures, targeting and signaling mechanisms.
Invited:
Jonathan Hopper, University of Oxford and CEO and co-Founder of OMass, developing mass spectrometry as a tool for structural biology of membrane protein assemblies.
SMALP Workshop Leader
Sarah Lee, Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, focussing on SMALPing the E.coli divisome protein ZipA; previously at the University of Warwick, University of Oxford, Roche Pharmaceuticals.
Conference Organizers: Tomas Laursen and Michael Overduin
http://www.smalp.net/meetings.html