UTMB Structural Biology Symposium

The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) eleventh Structural Biology Symposium is here again and the keynote speaker, Alan Fersht, spoke about protein stability issues in the context of evaluating the melting points of P53 and the possibility of using small peptides to stabilize the protein. However, I found Jacqueline Barton's talk on the conductivity of DNA to charge and possible DNA damage sensing of proteins to be the most fascinating of the first day. As a person interested in NMR techniques the true high light of the conference was Joshua Wand's discussion of using methyl side chains motions as a measure of the proteins entropy ( or as I like to refer to the idea, an entropic capacitor )