EMBO Worshop

Proteolysis and Neurodegeneration

(5th INPROTEOLYS meeting)

1. General Summary

Protein destruction determines a wide variety of cellular functions in the CNS. Dysfunctions of these processes are at the origin of many pathologies including most neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer. Parkinson, and Huntington diseases. During this meeting, topics related to the role of proteolysis in normal  neuronal physiology and under neurodegeration were discussed. In particular protein destruction by autophagy and the ubiquitin-proteasome pathways were covered in this symposium and examples of such mechanism were discussed in the frame of Alzheimer, Parkinson, Huntington and other neurodegenerative diseases.

The selected speakers were international experts in the field. In addition, the event has been designed to attract young researchers giving them the opportunity to develop long term links with their peers. Also, the program was oriented towards the in-depth debate of frontier issues and the development of new strategies.

The meeting was hold in the Fundación Ramón Arecesin the center of Madrid and in the Instituto de Física Miguel Catalán in the near-by CSIC central campus. More than 110 persons attended the meeting, both sexes being equally represented, and coming from 17 different countries from Asia, North and South America, and Europe.

Besides the scientific sessions the meeting included a welcome reception, a guided visit to the Madrid de la Letras (with Spanish tapas included) and a Gala dinner that was hold on the last night of the meeting.

2. Scientific highlights

The Conference gathered the most prominent speakers of the field that came from all over the world, including Japan, USA and Europe. All sessions included several invited speakers and 3-4 Oral presentations selected from the participant’s abstracts.

In the first day the open lecture was given by Sam Sisodia and focused in the role of presenilins in BAPP processing, highlighting new results on the structure of the purified presenilin complex based on cryo-electron microscopy data and reconstruction. The second day of the Workshop was mainly focused on autophagy, which has gained a lot of attention in the last years for its role in neuronal function and neurodegeneration. Speakers included: Ana Maria Cuervo, Noboru Mizushima, Francesco Cecconi, Ralph Nixon, David Rubinsztein and Wiep Scheper.

The third day the invited speakers were Michael Coleman, Santiago Rodríguez de Córdoba and Sarah Tabrizi and they focused in the role of proteasome system in neuronal function and pathology. In addition Michele Vendruscolo gave the EMBO YI award lecture on the use of bioinformatics to predict protein conformation in the over-crowded cell environment.

3. Organisation and reaction of the participants

The conference was divided in two sessions per day with a lunch and poster session in between. The fact that the poster session and the lunch was held simultaneously lead to extensive networking among the participants and allowed the students and young participants to be in close contact with the invited speakers that were very interested in the posters. A general discussion on the topics presented took place at the end of both sessions.

All the participants agree in the excellent quality of the scientific sessions and even the invited speakers manifested the same opinion in the sessions. Moreover the quality of the posters was also of high standart.

The EMBO poster prize was attributed to Marta Isasa from the IBMB of Barcelona for her work on Monoubiquitylation of the proteasomal subunit Rpn10. The best oral presentation was awarded by ENZO to the young investigator Matilde Cescon from the University of Padova, for her work describing Collagen VI signaling in primary neuronal cell cultures.  These recognitions to the effort provided by our young investigators was well appreciated by all people attending to this scientific event.

As far as we can tell from the comments received form scientists attending to this Workshop, the organization was excellent and the quality of both oral and poster presentations was comparable to other EMBO workshops they have attended. 

4. Forward Look

As neurodegeneration is a problem of the actual times, it is very likely that it will continue to be a topic of interest for the future. A second workshop with the same subject could be considered in a coupe of years. Since the meeting was a great success INPROTEOLYS plan to continue organizing such thematic Workshops on the role of intracellular proteolysis in physiology and pathology. The next Inproteolysis meeting will be held in Valencia in 2011 and the topic will be “Proteolysis and Cancer”. We hope to be able to count again with the support of EMBO.