Category: Meetings/Events

Last week, I attended the PI’s meeting for the Joint DMS/NIGMS Initiative to Support Research in the Area of Mathematical Biology, a program managed by us and NSF’s Division of Mathematical Sciences. A key goal of the program is to bring mathematicians and new mathematical approaches into the core of biological and biomedical research.

I was a grantee of this program before I came to NIGMS, so it was interesting to see how the program has evolved and to meet other scientists finding synergy between math and biology.

During the two-day meeting, researchers and students supported by the program shared their experiences, exchanged ideas and explored new collaborations in the field of mathematical biology. Their oral and poster presentations covered a spectrum of topics, from protein and RNA structure prediction to modeling biological complexity and statistical inference. The meeting also featured six brainstorming breakout sessions that helped the program officials identify future opportunities and challenges for the field.

Here are few ideas that caught my attention:

• Several speakers emphasized that the quest for stimulating the innovative use of mathematics should not undermine the application of well established mathematical approaches in biology.
• Dynamical systems theory, which describes how complex networks change over time, suggests that the architecture underlying a biological network’s control system may have been evolutionary selected to support the delicate balance between robustness and efficiency.
• Methods for studying the spread of infectious diseases could also be used to study the spread of emotional states (depression, happiness, etc.).

If you are interested in mathematical biology, visit the meeting Web site—it will be updated soon with the meeting abstracts, slides and photos. If you would like to apply for funding for mathematical biology research, look for an announcement about the program’s next solicitation on the Feedback Loop around the end of July.

Registration is now open for our second Quantitative and Systems Pharmacology Workshop, which will be held September 9-10 on the NIH campus in Bethesda, MD. The meeting is intended primarily for pharmacologists, pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic modelers, systems biologists and others working in fields relevant to this emerging discipline.

I first announced plans for the workshop on the Feedback Loop, and your comments both to the post and to the organizing committee helped us develop the agenda. This year’s scientific talks, researcher perspectives, panel discussions and poster presentations will focus on key questions related to the integration of pharmacology and systems biology and how it can aid our understanding of drug actions and drug discovery. Specific questions range from how we articulate a vision for systems pharmacology to what needs to happen to achieve that vision.

The meeting’s co-chairs, Peter Sorger of Harvard Medical School and Sandra Allerheiligen of Merck, Inc., along with the organizing committee have put together an exciting group of confirmed speakers who represent academia, industry and the many disciplines relevant to systems pharmacology. Please note that we are still adding specific talk titles and soliciting poster presentations.

Registration is free, but slots are limited—don’t postpone registering if you want to attend!

Interested in new methods for improving the speed, cost and success of protein structure determination? Want to learn more about how to use structural and biophysical methods to functionally characterize macromolecules? Then consider attending our 10th annual Enabling Technologies in Structure and Function workshop from April 19-21, 2010, on the NIH campus in Bethesda, MD. There’s no registration fee.

As in years past, the 2010 workshop will cover all the practical issues concerning protein structure determination and biophysical methods. Presentations will focus on topics such as protein structure and function, hybrid methods, bioinformatics and homology modeling, and crystallization methods for soluble proteins and membrane proteins. In addition, we’re offering two hands-on workshops on methods for solving difficult crystallization problems and tools for mining the rich structure and function databases for biological macromolecules. There will also be a poster session.

We build the oral sessions from attendees’ submitted poster abstracts, so we will continue to finalize the agenda in the coming weeks.

The program is very student-friendly, and we welcome scientists involved in structural efforts abroad. Please feel free to forward this note to anyone who may like to attend.

Last week, the American Society for Cell Biology held its 49th annual meeting  in San Diego. There were thousands of attendees, including many of our funded investigators as well as a few of us from NIGMS. As a new program director, I enjoyed meeting many of the grantees and applicants I’ve talked to on the phone or by e-mail. I met a few others, too, who stopped by the NIGMS booth to get information on funding opportunities.

I can’t even begin to come up with an exhaustive list of all highlights from the 5-day program, so I will share just a few.

I was most excited about how discoveries made using “simple” organisms, such as yeast and unicellular algae, are informing models of human disease in new ways. For example, studies of centriole biogenesis and cilia formation in invertebrates have provided a mechanistic understanding of human ciliopathic disorders such as Bardet-Biedl syndrome. Interestingly, the relationship between human disorders and basic research is a two-way street: By doing a genetic analysis of plant and invertebrate orthologs of genes mutated in people with Bardet-Biedl syndrome, researchers have identified an evolutionarily conserved ciliogenesis “toolkit.”

In his keynote symposium talk, Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch presented another way to think about model systems. He discussed the potential of deriving induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from patients, causing the cells to differentiate into a certain type or organ system, and then using the differentiated cells to test for patient-specific drug interventions or gene therapy treatments. There are still scientific and technical challenges, such as recreating the progression of disease development and pathology in a culture dish, but I think that using iPS cells to model human disease may revolutionize our understanding of the cellular basis of disease and, in turn, help us learn more about how normal cells work.

The meeting also stressed the importance of science outreach. During a plenary lecture about the role of NIH in supporting basic research, especially in cell biology, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins also talked about the role of scientists in educating various groups on the intrinsic value and economic impact of scientific research. Dr. Lawrence S. B. Goldstein echoed this sentiment during his acceptance speech for the ASCB Public Service Award by describing how even small efforts, such as explaining the potential of stem cell research to your neighbor, can have a cumulative impact.

I left knowing that this is definitely an exciting time to be a cell biologist, and I’m already looking forward to the 2010 meeting in Philadelphia.