American Crystallographic Association meet in Chicago

The three recipients of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be attending the 60th annual meeting of the American Crystallographic Association (ACA) at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers on July 24 — 29, 2010.

Highlights of the meeting include plenary lectures by the three Nobel Laureates, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of Cambridge University, Thomas Steitz of Yale University, and Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute. Their lectures will describe their ground-breaking structural studies over the past decades of the ribosome, a large, complex biological machine in all living things that translates the DNA code into functional proteins that carry out various cellular tasks.

A thousand structural scientists from the Americas and around the world will descend on Chicago in late July to discuss all aspects of academic and industrial research in X-ray and neutron crystallography, scattering, and diffraction. Crystallography is the study of all matter—chemical, biological, physical—at the atomic level, and therefore encompasses researchers from the biological, chemical, geological, health, and physical sciences, engineering, mathematics, and medicine.

Monday will feature the Transactions Symposium, which is dedicated to the memory of Bob Bau, a past President of the ACA and a distinguished chemist from the University of Southern California who was well known for his fundamental work on hydrogen, transition-metal chemistry, and metalloproteins. As part of this session, there will be a talk by Joel Miller of University of Utah who will discuss molecule-based materials exhibiting the technologically important property of bulk magnetism that have been prepared using conventional organic synthetic chemistry.

Also on Monday will be a session sponsored by the Fiber, Small Angle Scattering, and Synchrotron Scientific Interest Groups (SIGs), entitled Fibril-forming Pathological Peptides. This session will focus on the structural aspects and roles of fiber-like aggregations associated with diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and mad cow disease, the topics of the presentation by Gerald Stubbs’s of Vanderbilt University.

Tuesday will showcase sessions on Weird Materials, sponsored by the Materials, Powder, and Small Angle Scattering SIGs and on Functional Materials, sponsored by the Neutron, Materials, and Powder SIGs. In Weird Materials, Jerry Lynn of the National Institute of Standards and Technology will talk about the nature of magnetic frustration, “spin-ice”, and how magnetic monopoles emerge from this very special magnetic material.

Clarina dela Cruz of Oak Ridge National Laboratory will present results that are important to the hot topic of iron-based superconductors in the Functional Materials session.

On Wednesday there will be a session to complement the Nobel Laureates’ lectures. The session entitled Macromolecules, Complexes and Assemblies is sponsored by the Biological Macromolecule and Small Angle Scattering SIGs. It will feature recent research results on three-dimensional structures of biological macromolecular complexes and assemblies using X-ray and neutron diffraction and scattering techniques along with cryo-electron microscopy and computational methods.

Many modern conveniences from refrigeration to optical data storage rely on the ability to transform a material from one phase or state to another. Thursday will see John Evans of Durham University in the UK present his work in the session Mechanisms of Phase Transitions, sponsored by Materials, Powder, Neutron, and Small Angle Scattering SIGs. He will describe his work on how the spatial arrangement of atoms in materials evolves during the course of a phase transition.

Two senior scientists will receive awards for their extraordinary efforts in the development of crystallographic methods and analysis and in crystallographic computing.

The 2010 Isidor Fankuchen Award will be presented on Sunday to David J. Watkins of University of Oxford for his work on the crystallographic computing package “CRYSTALS.”

The 2010 Kenneth Trueblood award will be made on Thursday to Anthony L. Spek of Utrecht University for his outstanding contributions to chemical crystallography and crystallographic computing.

We will also recognize remarkable accomplishments of a young scientist through the 2010 Margaret C. Etter Early Career Award that will be presented on Tuesday to Raymond C. Trievel of University of Michigan for his work in elucidating the substrate specificity and catalytic mechanism of histone methyltransferase, an enzyme that transfers a methyl group from one compound to another.

In addition, on Saturday, July 24th, a series of workshops will be held to help attendees keep abreast of computer software and technique developments in the various fields of crystallography, scattering, and diffraction. A highlight of these workshops is the first offering of a session designed for high school teachers that will give them hands-on experience with elements of crystallography and structure determination and give them activities to bring back to their classrooms to spark student interest in science in general and crystallography in particular. This outreach event is funded by the National Science Foundation and the U. S. National Committee on Crystallography (National Academies of Science), and it has been certified by the State of Illinois for continuing education credit for the participants.

For more information, please visit the ACA website at http://www.amercrystalassn.org or contact Bernie Santarsiero (bds@uic.edu, 312-413-0339), ACA Local Meeting Chair, or Ross Angel (rangel@vt.edu ), ACA Program Chair.