CONFERENCE: Protein Folding on the Ribosome; December 14-16, 2019; Berlin, Germany

The 2019 Annual Meeting on Protein Folding on the Ribosome will be held at the Charite University of Berlin in Berlin, Germany on December 16-18, 2019. Understanding nascent protein behavior in the cellular context presents a host of challenges both theoretically and experimentally. This meeting will bring together leading experts to present their latest research, identify crucial questions and key challenges that could be addressed through a combined theoretical and experimental effort. This international meeting will be attended by faculty, postdocs and graduate students. It is expected that this meeting will strengthen US science by bringing together US-based scientists at different career stages to discuss cutting-edge results on an exciting area at the intersection of genetics and molecular biophysics. Travel assistance to US graduate students and postdocs to attend this international meeting will promote the training of a global workforce and support their career development through various networking opportunities with scientists around the world.

The past several years has seen high impact publications describing co-translational protein folding and other co-translational processes have emerged. Experiments utilizing single molecule techniques, cryo-EM, deep sequencing and a variety of other methods have generated a wealth of data that can inform both theory and simulation and thereby provide fundamental insights into the physical principles of nascent protein folding. Concurrently, theory and simulation methods are also being developed to model the length and time scales of such large biological systems. At this crucial juncture, with advances being made on many fronts, it is important to bring together theoreticians and experimentalists to map out how these two communities can move the nascent protein folding field forward together. The topics this conference will cover include: mRNA sequence evolution under the constraints of co-translational processes, co-translational protein quality control system, protein folding on the ribosome probed experimentally and theoretically, the coupling of co-translational processes to translation-elongation kinetics, nascent protein maturation: chaperones, targeting and membrane translocation and downstream processes influenced by what happens during protein biogenesis. This meeting is supported by the Molecular Biophysics and the Genetic Mechanism Clusters of the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.