24th Heart of Europe Bio-Crystallography meeting took place at Lipno – Dolní Vltavice, Czech Republic between 22-24 September 2022 and was organised by the group of Ivana Kuta Smatanova from the Faculty of Sciences University of South Bohemia Ceske Budejovice.
The Heart of Europe Bio-Crystallography Meeting (short HEC-Meeting) is an annual academic conference on structural biology, in particular protein crystallography. Researchers from universities, other research institutions and industry from Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, and Poland meet to present and discuss current topics of their research. The talks are predominantly given by PhD students (doctoral students). An exception is the invited HEC lecture, which is held by a renowned scientist of the research field. Kay Diederichs from University of Konstanz, Germany gave the HEC-24 Keynote lecture entitled “A better understanding of X-ray data quality indicators.”
The meeting was attended by Sebastian Glatt, Przemysław Grudnik, Piotr Wilk, Keerthiraju E Ravichandran, Elżbieta Wątor, Marta Walczak, and Paweł Kochanowski from our group.
Przemysław Grudnik gave a presentation entitled “ Hypusination and beyond” as part of the new HEC group. Elzbieta Wator gave an oral talk entitled “Halfway to hypusine. Molecular basis of (deoxy)hypusination” during the first session. On the second day of the meeting Keerthiraju E Ravichandran gave an overall summary of his PhD work entitled “E2/E3-independent ubiquitin-like protein conjugation by Urm1 protects the proteome under oxidative stress.” The participants of the meeting were largely from the crystallography research groups from Germany, Poland, and Czech Republic. Though the crystallography-based research were in large, Cryo-EM studies too were part of the meeting. The PhD students presented their research findings in two different modes. Either a 12 mins talk or a five min short talk. On the final day of the meeting four talks were given by post-doctoral research fellows. Finally, Elżbieta Wątor won the best presentation award and first prize for her talk from the HEC-24 meeting. Overall, the three-day meetings provided a great insight into the development of the crystallography-based research in Europe.
On societal front, Boat trip at Lipno lake was organised by the HEC-24 committee organisers.
