Macromolecular Modeling Blog ™

When: September 21-23, 2009

Where: Town and Country Hotel, San Diego, CA

What: I’m writing to let you know about a conference taking place next month in San Diego, that has a new parallel conference called “Protein Engineering and Design”. I’m chairing the last day’s sessions, and there are a few Rosetta-based talks in them as well as some other interesting protein engineering. This is a conference aimed significantly at industry, but should be interesting to academics looking for connections between their work and the world of biotech/pharma.

More Info: Website / Brochure

By Jonathan Davis.

Jonathan Davis is a Principal Scientist in Protein Design at Adnexus, a Bristol-Myers Squibb R&D Company.

RosettaCon 2009 has ended just a few days ago.

This was a very exciting meeting, gathering almost all Rosetta developers from around the world, and representatives of the major industry licensees of Rosetta. The talks were quite diverse, ranging from new Rosetta protocols under development, applications with regards to numerous biological systems, and up to code architecture and future development of the code.

For scientists specializing in a specific field (such as computational structural biology – just off the top of my head) there are rare occasions in which meetings are dedicated entirely to their topic. This was such a conference! All through the three days of conference and one day of hiking, people had talked, discussed, brain stormed, ate, breathed, thought, swam, hiked, mingled and laughed protein structure. If the coffee break was drawn as a comic figure, with bubble clouds to depict thoughts and conversations, it would be a sea of alpha-helices, weird looking loops, rotamers, ligands and co-factors at interfaces, strange folds and stranger rainbow colored cartoon proteins. A modeler’s utopia.
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