Calendar of events, awards and opportunities

Sept. 29: ASBMB Lipid Research Division Seminar Series

The ASBMB Lipid Research Division features the work of young investigators at noon Eastern on Wednesdays. If you are interested in presenting, please contact John Burke. Register once to access the whole series.

This week's speakers and topics will be:

Shirley Tremel of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge: Structural basis for VPS34 kinase activation by Rab1 and Rab5 on membranes

Nívea Pereira De Sá of Stonybrook University: Structure and inhibition of Cryptococcus neoformans sterylglucosidase to develop antifungal agents

Important 2022 ASBMB Annual Meeting deadlines

The ASBMB annual meeting will be held in person in Philadelphia in April. Here are the deadlines you need to know.

Registration

• Sept. 15: Early registration (largest discount) begins
• Feb. 7: Early registration ends
• Feb. 8: Advance registration (smaller but still significant discount) begins
• March 18: Advance registration ends
• March 19: Regular registration begins

Abstracts

• Sept. 15: Regular submissions begin
• Oct. 15: Deadline for ASBMB’s fast-track program (guaranteed a decision within two weeks)
• Nov. 30: Regular submissions end
• Dec. 15: Last-chance submissions begin
• Jan. 27: Last-chance submissions end

Travel awards

• Sept. 15: Applications now accepted
• Dec. 7: Deadline for applications

Who among you loves tweeting about lipids?

The ASBMB's Journal of Lipid Research invites graduate students, postdocs and early-career investigators to take over the JLR Twitter account (@jlipidres) for a day apiece to talk about their favorite lipids. To express interest, fill out the JLR #LipidTakeover application. Also, the ASBMB Lipid Research Division just started its own Twitter feed. Check it out at @AsbmbLrd.

Seminar series on gene function across organisms

The Genetics Society of America is hosting a free series of seminars through November exploring gene function across humans and model organisms. GSA's president, Hugo Bellen, explained the impetus for this series in an op-ed in May. He wrote, in part, "We believe that these seminars will be useful to investigators at all career stages and across different model organisms, as well as for human biologists. We hope this will add a new dimension to research, reveal unanticipated phenotypes, speed up discovery, allow new funding opportunities, and lead to the discovery of new fundamental aspects of biology." Below is the schedule of seminars. See the speakers and register here.

Oct. 4 — Monarch Initiative: Cross-species phenotype comparison for disease diagnosis and discovery

Nov. 1 — Unraveling the links between hereditary and viral microcephaly

Sept. 29: NIGMS lecture by Johnson about bacterial sphingolipids

Elizabeth Johnson

The National Institute for General Medical Sciences is holding its Judith H. Greenberg Early Career Investigator Lecture at 1 p.m. Eastern on Sept. 29.

The featured speaker, Elizabeth Johnson, will give a talk via Zoom titled “Looking for Lipids in All the Right Places: Host–Microbiome Interactions​.”

Johnson, an ASBMB member, will discuss how bacterial sphingolipids affect host signaling pathways and then participate in a 30-minute Q&A session on her research and career path. Register here.

Johnson was recently selected as an Azrieli Global Scholar by CIFAR.

Sept. 30: Early registration deadline for serine proteases meeting

The virtual meeting Serine Proteases in Pericellular Proteolysis and Signaling continues the tradition of the ASBMB special symposium on membrane-anchored serine proteases with an expanded focus on other related proteases with overlapping substrates and functions in the pericellular environment.

The conference brings together the leading national and international researchers in the field of pericellular proteolysis and provides them with a forum to present their latest findings, exchange ideas and technologies, and network to form collaborations. Equally important, it also provides a venue for junior investigators at the graduate student and postdoctoral level to discuss their current research, meet with experts in the field and forge new scientific interactions crucial for their future career development.

Save the date: ASBMB Deuel Conference on Lipids

The ASBMB Deuel conference is a must-attend event for leading lipids investigators — and for scientists who’ve just begun to explore the role of lipids in their research programs. This event will bring together a diverse array of people — including those who have not attended Deuel or perhaps any lipid meeting before.

The meeting will be held March 1–4 in Monterey, Calif.

“We'd love to bring in people who might not have cut their teeth in the lipid metabolism field but have found their way to studying lipids. In many cases, that's where you get the most exciting, unusual and off-the-wall presentations, and that can spark collaborations that may have otherwise not have happened,” explains co-organizer Russell DeBose-Boyd.

This year's theme is "Location, location, location: How lipid trafficking impacts cell signaling and metabolism."

Co-organizer Arun Radhakrishnan explains it this way: “In recent years, we have begun to gain deep insights into the mechanisms of lipid trafficking. We thought it would be great to have a meeting focusing on that aspect and what those what these new insights are telling us about cell signaling and metabolism.”

Abstracts will be accepted starting Sept. 1. See the program and learn more.

Oct. 6–9: Emerging roles of the nucleolus

This unique meeting will bring together scientists who focus on nucleolar structure and function, but with diverse research perspectives and approaches, to facilitate a wide-ranging discussion and an in-depth exploration of the subject from many angles. The topics addressed will range in scope from basic biology to human disease, including the biophysical properties of this organelle, cancer prognosis and treatments, and reproduction. Learn more.

Call for virtual scientific event proposals

The ASBMB provides members with a virtual platform to share scientific research and accomplishments and to discuss emerging topics and technologies with the BMB community.

The ASBMB will manage the technical aspects, market the event to tens of thousands of contacts and present the digital event live to a remote audience. Additional tools such as polling, Q&A, breakout rooms and post event Twitter chats may be used to facilitate maximum engagement.

Seminars are typically one to two hours long. A workshop or conference might be longer and even span several days.

Prospective organizers may submit proposals at any time. Decisions are usually made within four to six weeks. 

Propose an event.

Evolution and core processes in gene expression

Coming to an in-person venue in the summer of 2022: The focus of this meeting is to discuss the most recent insights into the cis-regulatory code, how cis-regulatory information is read out by transcription factors, signaling pathways and other proteins, how cellular diversity is created during development and how we can study this problem using cutting-edge genomics technology and computational methods.

The meeting will simultaneously examine the problem from an evolutionary perspective: how cis-regulatory elements evolve, how regulatory variation affects gene expression and phenotypes, how these changes have shaped development and parallel evolution, and how noise affects regulatory circuits and their evolution.

Stay tuned for abstract and registration deadlines.