East Coast Protein Meeting 2009

The East Coast Protein Meeting was held in Coffs Harbour from 31st July - 2nd August. A joint initiative of the Sydney Protein Group and the Queensland Protein Group, this 3 day conference held every two years, is an excellent arena for established and young protein scientists to mix on an equal footing in a relaxed atmosphere. This year’s meeting was organised by the Sydney contingent of Liza Cubeddu, Roland Gamsjaeger, Ann Kwan, Chu Kong Liew, Daniel Kolarich and Sandra Wissmueller. The meeting focuses specifically on giving younger scientists the opportunity to give oral presentations. This year we were spoiled with 30 great short talks by early career researchers (PhD students and early post-docs). As an extra treat, we had two excellent plenary speakers: Prof Rob Parton (IMB, Brisbane) and A/Prof Catherine Day from the University of Otago (NZ). Rob is an international expert in the organization, dynamics and functions of the cell plasma membrane. He talked to us about caveolae, cell surface pits involved in lipid regulation and endocytosis, and the recent identification of a multiprotein coat complex of cavin proteins that is required for caveola formation. Catherine is an outstanding structural biologist who gave us a great story about the structure and function of E3-ligases and their intricate network of interactions that bring about the regulation of apoptosis. We had a strong number of registrants and the conference was enjoyed by all.

We would like to thank the sponsors of the meeting, whose generous support made it possible. The Australian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) supported us at all levels (National, NSW and QLD). We also had strong trade support: Waters Corporation, Dionex, In Vitro Technologies, Millennium Science, Agilent Technologies, Genesearch, Invitrogen, Pall and Shimadzu.
 
We gave out a number of awards for talks and posters:
Best Postdoc talk - Lawrence Lee (VCCRI), runner-up - Medhi Mobli (IMB)
Best Student talk - Alastair Stewart (VCCRI), runner-up - Simone Reynolds (QIMR)
Best Poster - Sock Yue Thong (USyd), runners-up - Zakir Tnimov (IMB) and Soumya Joseph (USyd)

The student travel prizes were sponsored by Bruker Australia, Bruker-Daltonics, Macquarie University Biomolecular Frontiers Research Centre, GE Healthcare and ATA Scientific:
Student Travel Awards
NSW - Mitch O'Connell, Robyn Mansfield, Ingrid MacIndoe, Vanessa Morris and Paula Vaz
QLD - Thomas Ve, Eleanor Leung, Simone Reynolds and Christophe Schmitz