In the second week of May our post-doc, Dr Alexander Hammermeister participated in the exclusive Macromolecular Crystallography & Cryo-EM School (MCCS). This year MCCS was organized by Dr Armandon Albert and Dr Juan A. Hermoso, both from the Department of Crystallography and Structural Biology of the Institute of Physical-Chemistry Rocasolano, CSIC, Spanish National Research Council in Madrid.

The workshop is reserved for a narrow group of specialists that need a deeper insight into the most advanced crystallographic and CryoEM techniques. It covered aspects of a sample preparation, structure solution, model building, crystallographic refinement, validation and analysis of the structural results. Additionally, it presented an overview of the newest structural biology technologies, like dynamic crystallography at XFEL and synchrotron and ligand building for drug discovery. The 25 international participants of this „intimate” workshop, had the chance to discuss and/or troubleshoot their own data with the invited software developers of e.g. XDS, PHENIX and CCP4.