2nd Joint German/UK Bioenergetics Conference - Integration of structures, spectroscopies and mechanisms

University of Edinburgh, UK
2 - 4 April 2008

Link: http://www.biochemistry.org/meetings/programme.cfm?Meeting_No=SA074

The aim of this meeting is to stimulate British/German collaborative research in bioenergetics, an area in which both countries have great strengths, by following up the first meeting held in Naurod, Germany from 20th to 24th March 2005. This first meeting attracted more than 130 participants, initiating many new contacts between UK and German laboratories and resulting in a set of 14 review articles that were published in Biochemical Society Transactions. A full report of the meeting also appeared in the June 2005 edition of The Biochemist. We believe this follow-up meeting will capitalise on the momentum created from the first conference and further promote research interactions between Germany and the UK .

In the post-genomic era, the sequences of vast numbers of proteins involved in bioenergetic processes have become available. The determination of the structures of some of these proteins is also advancing rapidly. Thus background structural data for understanding how proteins facilitate energy transduction is becoming more widespread. In order to derive full value from this burgeoning mass of data, the functional consequences of structures must be understood and this can be approached by integrating information from spectroscopy, kinetics and thermodynamics with structural data. This meeting will bring together key scientists from the UK and Germany whose research is at the forefront of these areas.