Highlights

We hope everyone that attended the conference enjoyed all aspects and had a pleasant journey home. Once again we would like to thank all of the participants who made the conference a success and we would particularly like to extend our gratitude to all of the speakers. We were delighted to be able to host participants from 21 countries covering 5 continents.

The major topics of the conference were Biosynthesis of Natural Products and Enzyme Mechanisms. There were also short sessions on Protein Evolution and Design and on Computational Approaches to Enzyme Mechanisms. A large number of pharmaceutically useful compounds are natural products. However, their structural complexity frequently makes synthesis challenging. Elucidation of the biosynthetic pathways opens up the possibility of using enzymes for synthesis and engineering the enzymes to produce novel natural products with potential as drugs. In addition, the biosynthetic pathways frequently contain novel enzymes with unknown mechanisms. The presentations ranged from basic descriptions of the large variety of natural products produced by mxyobacteria to identification of the enzymes involved in synthesis of alkaloids or vitamin B12. Separate sessions discussed methods of altering the specificity of enzymes to obtain new reactivities; these made clear both the potential of such approaches and the limitations of the present methods. Engineering of protein activity is limited by both the available computational approaches for rational design and the limited ability of random genetic approaches to sample the range of possible proteins. The sessions on enzyme mechanisms discussed both details analyses of transitions states in enzyme-catalyzed reactions to probe mechanisms and the roles of protein motions in catalysis. Finally, a session on computational enzymology illustrated the growing ability to complement mechanistic and structural studies with computer analysis from first principles. Many of these techniques will undoubtedly be applied to the newly discovered enzymes involved in natural product biosynthesis, both to clarify their novel mechanisms and to redesign their specificities.

Thanks are due to those who provided generous financial support to the meeting: the Centro Stefano Franscini, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the IUBMB, the Swiss Societies for Experimental Biology, the American Chemical Society, and several companies: ActivX, Firmenich, New England Biolabs, GE Healthcare, Wyatt, Technology, Biotek, and Witec AG. This support defrayed the costs of the invited speakers and allowed most of the conference meals to be held in the Centro Stefan Franscini, increasing the interaction among the participants.

Below are some snapshots taken by Cyril Moccand (University of Geneva) as a reminder of some of the events that took place over the week.

Snapshots from the conference

Click a picture to see a larger view.

Last update on Aug 23, 2010