Biocrystallography course: From gene to drug
A four days course, organized by the Centre of Excellence in Biocrystallography (CEB) of the
University of Trieste, Italy, will be held on 8-11 September 2003 in Trieste on issues related to
protein expression (1 day), X-ray structure determination (2 days) and in silico analysis (1 day).
The course is intended for students in the early stages of their research career, will cover methods
for over-expression of proteins in procaryotic and eukaryotic systems, purification and
crystallization techniques, X-ray diffraction and strategies for solving the crystal structure,
computational methods in structural genomic, molecular modelling and computer-aided design.
Protein crystallography is a highly interdisciplinary field with people from many different
background. The ideal biocrystallographer should be familiar with molecular biology and protein
biochemistry as well as biophysics, structural biology and computational methods. In practice,
students of biochemistry, chemistry, biology, biophysics and more rarely trained crystallographers
or physicists do not know the whole process that transform the gene information into knowledge of
biological functional properties of the protein through its 3-D structure.
This course will try to connect these methodologies in such a way to cover the main experimental
procedures essential to follow the process of gene product characterization through its three-
dimensional atomic structure.
This Biocrystallography course is sponsorised by the European Science Foundation
(Program on Integrated Approaches for Functional Genomics).
The course will involve European students and speakers. The possibility to join together
teachers of different fields and students with a variety of backgrounds in the same place for four
days will advance collaboration and research in the interdisciplinary field of Structural Biology.
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