19-21 June 2008

"S-SAD diffraction data phasing of macromolecule single crystals from home and Synchrotron X-ray sources"
This workshop was organized by members of the ITQB Macromolecular Crystallography Unit under the coordination of Pedro Matias and Daniele de Sanctis, with secretarial help from Ms. Mafalda Mateus.

A total of four invited speakers (all leading scientists in the field) and sixteen registered students took part in the workshop. Five of these students came from the Iberian Area: three from Portuguese Research Groups and two from Spain. The remaining eleven came from several laboratories in Europe (three from U.K., three from France, one from Finland two from Belgium, one from Germany and one from Netherlands). The speakers and the students from outside the Lisbon area were housed at the Praia-Mar Hotel, conveniently located near the workshop venue, and a shuttle bus was chartered to transport them from the hotel to the workshop venue in the morning and back in the evening.

The program consisted of eight morning sessions in the lecture format (including one dedicated to general discussion) and six afternoon sessions organized as tutorials. Furthermore a tutorial on the use of remote data collection with the ESRF was performed on the 19th of June. The same data were used on the tutorials of the following days and in the free time scheduled on June20 and 21 for the students to continue to work on their own.

The lecture sessions were very well presented and interesting, and were attended by other speakers and members of the ITQB MX Unit. They were also deliberately given in an informal fashion which stimulated questions from the audience. The mixture of more experienced students with younger ones was very precious in promoting the open discussion. The tutorial sessions were also very interesting and useful, highlighting well the aims of the workshop, since they clearly showed the students the feasibility of using the weak anomalous scattering from sulfur atoms in protein crystals to derive phase information using highly redundant and accurate data measured from a rotating anode or a synchrotron source. Furthermore the use of a "real" data set instead of a test case made the data processing and the structure solving more challenging and thus more interesting, and allowed a deeper analysis of each step of the tutorials.

3-6 October 2007

"S-SAD diffraction data phasing of macromolecule single crystals from home and Synchrotron X-ray sources"
Teach state of the art methods and protocols in the collection, processing, scaling and phasing of S-SAD diffraction data from crystals of macromolecules aimed at obtaining the best possible interpretable map prior to model building
The number of partecipants will be limited to 16. The course will be lectured by Gordon Leonard and George Sheldrick Clemens Vonrhein and Manfred Weiss.

The final program of the course can be found here

This workshop was organized by members of the ITQB Macromolecular Crystallography Unit under the coordination of Prof. Maria Arménia Carrondo, Dr. Pedro Matias and Dr. Daniele de Sanctis, with secretarial help from Ms. Mafalda Mateus.

The programme consisted of eight morning sessions in the lecture format (including one dedicated to general discussion) and six afternoon sessions organized as tutorials, using both data collected locally as well as provided by the invited speakers. In addition, some free time was scheduled on October 5 and 6 for the students to continue to work on their own. The lecture sessions were very well presented and interesting, and were attended by other speakers and members of the ITQB MX Unit. They were also deliberately given in an informal fashion which stimulated questions from the audience.
The tutorial sessions were also very interesting and useful, highlighting well the aims of the workshop, since they clearly showed the students the feasibility of using the weak anomalous scattering from sulfur atoms in protein crystals to derive phase information using highly redundant and accurate data measured from a rotating anode or a synchrotron source.
The students in general found the workshop very useful and in addition were able to understand the contents of the sessions, as indicated by the results of the final questionnaire.

Previous activities

         ITQB MX laboratory in the past years has been fully involved in training activity: BioCrys course "Fundamentals of Modern Methods in Biocrystallography" has been organized in 2002 and 2004 and 2006 by Maria Arménia Carrondo, Thomas Schneider and all other local MX members. These courses were very successful and had a highly motivated group of partecipatns. More detail on the last edition of this course can be found at http://biocrys.itqb.unl.pt

To assist BIOXHIT consolidating the dissemination of knowledge, further edition of the two courses are planned in 2008 as well as a more specific workshop.