ABOUT THE WCPCW

The West Coast Protein Crystallography Workshop (WCPCW), a biennial event, has grown in prominence and attendance since its inception about 40 years ago. It has become a pre-eminent venue for the presentation of useful structure information and developing techniques in the field of macromolecular crystallography.

The 250+ conferees include graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, senior faculty, and delegates from West Coast laboratories. Increasingly, crystallographers from other regions, both domestic and foreign, have participated as well. This Conference preserves its workshop character allowing for the productive interaction of all the participants.

A notable feature of the WCPCW is a schedule dominated with oral presentations by students, postdocs, and those who have been closely associated with the execution of the research presented. This allows for an impressive array of talks on exciting topics by rising stars. We anticipate an exciting schedule featuring outstanding science coupled with a unique collaborating opportunity for all members of the crystallographer community.

The deadline for registering and submitting an abstract has been extended to February 28, 2011.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Harry F. Noller
Robert L. Sinsheimer Professor of Molecular Biology, Department of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology, UCSC.
Director, Center for Molecular Biology of RNA

Harry Noller grew up in the East Bay, got his B.A. in biochemistry at UC Berkeley in 1960 and his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Oregon in 1965, where he did his graduate work on serine proteases with Sidney Bernhard in the Institute of Molecular Biology. He did postdoctoral research with Ieuan Harris at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge, followed by a second postdoc with Alfred Tissières at the University of Geneva, where he began working on ribosomes. In 1968 he joined the faculty at UC Santa Cruz, where he has been ever since. In the early 1970s, research in his lab began to point to the functional importance of ribosomal RNA, a view that was not widely shared in the ribosome community at that time. This led his lab to establish the first sequences of the rRNAs and solve their secondary structures (in collaboration with Carl Woese) by comparative sequence analysis. Next, they developed the first rapid chemical probing methods applicable to large RNAs, which allowed mapping the binding sites for tRNA, antibiotics, initiation and elongation factors, and ribosomal proteins on the ribosome. This approach led to the discovery of the hybrid states mechanism for translocation in 1989. An overwhelming desire to finally see the ribosome in all its glory motivated crystallization of the 70S ribosome. Beginning in the late 1990s, Noller's group solved the structures of functional complexes of the ribosome at 7.8, 5.5 and finally 3.7 Å resolution. These structures, together with structures from other labs, unambiguously established that the functional core of the ribosome is indeed made of RNA. More recently, Noller's group has begun to study the structural dynamics of the ribosome using FRET (in collaboration with the Clegg and Ha laboratories) and optical tweezers (in collaboration with the Tinoco and Bustamante laboratories). Away from the laboratory, Noller's interests include jazz, Italian automobiles and playing first base for the Poi Dogs in the Santa Cruz City Softball League.

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS

Tom Poulos
Celia Goulding
Sheryl Tsai
Hudel Luecke
Alex McPherson
Fran Jurnak
Nita Driscoll
University of California, Irvine

[ back to top ]