Australian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Conference

The 3-day program will feature a number of overseas plenary presentations, society speciality lectures, poster sessions, 3-minute poster presentations and an E/MCR mini-symposium are also planned. The scientific program of the conference will include the themes:

• Gene Editing
• RNA Biology
• Drug Discovery

Confirmed plenary speakers include Lingling Chen and Tom Blundell.

Lingling Chen is a molecular and RNA biologist from the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology (CAS), China. She developed methods for the genome-wide discovery and characterization of nonpolyadenylated RNAs, which led to the identification of sno-processed lncRNAs and circular RNAs. She also showed that some sno-processed lncRNAs are conspicuously absent in people with the neurodevelopmental genetic disorder Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS).

Tom Blundell is a biochemist and structural biologist from the University of Cambridge in the UK. He was a member of the team that solved the first structure of a protein hormone, insulin and has since made contributions to structural biology of polypeptide hormones, growth factors, receptor activation, signal transduction and DNA double-strand break repair. He has been involved in drug discovery with many drugs moved to clinical trials. He has developed software for protein modelling and understanding the effects of mutations on protein function, leading to new approaches to structure-guided and fragment-based lead discovery.