EuroSciCon announce that they now provide meeting reports from the majority of their events in various formats. By going to their new website, www.eurosciconpodcasts.com, scientists can read and listen to meeting reports from many different Life Science fields, including reports from events on: glycomics, tissue engineering and cytokine technology.   more »

The goal of this meeting, held by Euroscicon, was to enlarge the knowledge about host-pathogen interactions in agricultural species, because it gives us a realistic opportunity to identify disease resistance genes. Peter Kaiser’s (Head of the Avian Genomics group at the Institute for Animal Health) project aims to identify the molecular components of the immune system that are shared between mammals and birds.The studies try to understand the bird’s immune response (particularly the repertoire of immune response genes and its innate immune response) and identifying disease resistance genes . Once the genes, have been identified the study will focus on single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in these genes between different lines of chickens   more »

EuroSciCon has brought together the most up to date glycomics research in their new ’Glycomics: Challenges and Technologies’ book. which documents the meeting proceedings and technical notes from their extremely popular one day meeting in November 2006. If you didn’t manage to attend this event and would like to read about the latest research in this field you can order the book now.   more »

The scope of this small pan-European meeting (on 13th October 2006) covered many of the functions of heat shock proteins and was a reminder of how this family of proteins interacts with many biological systems and has far reaching implications in the manipulation of disease processes. Dr Kathy Triantafilou (Sussex, UK) has a long established interest in innate immune recognition of microbial pathogens with particular respect to LPS. Elegant fluorescent non radioactive energy transfer (FRET) studies have been carried out on cells stimulated with LPS which demonstrate the clustering of HSP70 and 90 around TLR4 in lipid rafts. LPS and HSP70 compete for binding to TLR4 and using truncated fragments of HSP70 the critical residues for LPS/HSP binding in the ATP binding cleft were identified. This work was carried out using human HSP70 and demonstrated that the signalling pathways are MyD88 dependent.   more »

Nominations are now open for all the Royal Society's Medals and Awards which recognise excellence in science across the disiplines and exist to reward those who have made outstanding achievements.

Nominations open for the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award, the Royal Society’s premier women in science Award

The 2007 round of the Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship Scheme is now open. This Junior Fellowship scheme is designed to help overcome obstacles that prevent some of the most talented scientists to develop their research careers.   more »

While in the last few years genomic and proteomic projects advanced uninterruptedly, understanding glycans still presents several difficulties: they have a non-template driven biosynthesis, there is no system for the amplification of carbohydrates, and their characterization is still complicated. Moreover, the glycosylation patterns are complex and carbohydrate homeostasis requires considerable cellular control. Fortunately, Glycomics is advancing: the new technologies developed, the optimized experimental strategies and the Bioinformatics tools are making their move. On November 28, 2006 Euroscicon Conference “Glycomics: Challenges and Technologies” was held in London, and depicted an optimistic view of the advances in the area.   more »