Plenary 3 - Structural Biology IG Session

1100-1230 and 1330-1500 on Thursday 27 March

Session chair(s) including email address(es):
 
Lucia Banci (banci@cerm.unifi.it)
Antonio Rosato (rosato@cerm.unifi.it)
 
 
Overview:
 
Structural Biology (SB) is concerned with the determination of the three-dimensional (3D) structures of 
individual biomacromolecules (proteins and nucleic acids), and with those of complexes and higher order 
structures formed by association of these individual components. In addition, it is now very evident that 
the functional properties of these systems are often not adequately captured by looking at static 3D 
models and, consequently, dynamic properties must be assessed and accounted for. A variety of 
techniques, based on very different physical principles, allows researchers to investigate the structural 
and dynamic properties of biological macromolecules, at different levels of detail and for systems with 
different characteristics (e.g. 
solid vs. solution, large vs. small molecular weight, etc.).
Among others, the following data issues arise from the above background:
- common ontologies across all the structural biology disciplines still need to be identified
- the development of metadata for structural biology experiments is incomplete and not standardized
- there is no community-level consensus on the representation of data on biomacromolecular dynamics, 
either from experiments or simulations
- policies to make SB raw data discoverable and citable are not in place
 
The present session aims at identifying cross-disciplinary commonalities addressing the points 
mentioned above. Possible strategies to identify, implement and disseminate policies for adoption at 
least at the main Research Infrastructures in SB will be discussed.
 
AGENDA:
 
Session I ­ Thursday, March 27th, 2014 - 11.00 -12.30
Structural biology metadata
11.00 ­ - 11.15 The infrastructural scenario for SB ­ Lucia Banci
11.15 ­ - 11.35 SB at synchrotrons / interaction with the IG for Photon and Neutron Science ­ Erica Yang
11.35 - 11.50 Open issues for structural biology data and metadata ­ Antonio Rosato
11.50 - 12.05 Towards a SB Work Bench ­ Chris Morris
12.05 ­ - 12.30 General discussion
 

Session II ­ Thursday, March 27th, 2014 ­ 13.30 -15.00
Structural biology towards biomedicine and health
13.30 -13.50 Data management and processing pipelines at DLS ­ Alun Ashton
13.50 ­ - 14.05 Data management in NMR - Geerten Vuister
14.05 ­ - 14.20 weNMR: data management and processing on the European Grid ­ Antonio Rosato
14.20 ­ - 15.00 General Discussion (incl. IG future plans & identification of a use case / set of use cases)

 
A round-table discussion will recapitulate the main points to be included in a draft policy statement.
 
 
Links to additional reading material: