Biotechnology and Bioinformatics

The 15 members of each Theme Panel will meet, at least twice a year, to;

• put forward ideas for Focused Meetings
• consider proposals from other scientists within their field of expertise (referee the proposal)
• highlight to the Meetings Board areas of hot science that should be in the programme
• form part of the Science Advisory Committee for each Annual Meeting (BioScience)
• report to the Meetings Board
• develop interdisciplinary activities and collaborate with appropriate sister societies.

The Biotechnology and Bioinformatics Theme Panel is Theme Panel VI within the Biochemical Society. The group continues to represent broad interest in the general area of biotechnology and bioinformatics and plays a major role in organizing Society Meetings across diverse areas of biotechnology and bioinformatics research and education.

The Biotechnology and Bioinformatics Theme Panel welcomes suggestions for Biochemical Society meetings from all members of the scientific community. If you have an idea for a meeting, and wish to have an informal discussion with a member of a Theme Panel, you are welcome to contact that member. If you wish to submit a formal proposal for a meeting, complete the relevant form and forward it to meetings@biochemistry.org.

Careers in bioinformatics: life after graduate qualification?

by: Andy Brass

The pharmaceutical industry and the research councils have provided very clear signals that there is a significant skills shortage in bioinformatics and that this shortage should be addressed as a matter of high priority. As a response to this the UK academic community has worked hard to provide a wide variety of bioinformatics training in a range of institutes and at a range of levels. Specific details of all the Master's courses on offer within the UK are available at the CCP11 website. Details on the various research council schemes are available from the website of the respective council (BBSRC; MRC; EPSRC; Wellcome Trust). The number of postgraduate-trained bioinformatics students is therefore beginning to rise steeply.
This raises a number of issues:

• is there really a demand for postgraduate bionformaticians?
• if there is a shortage is this reflected by employers paying a premium for the skills?
• is the position likely to stay the same, at least for anyone currently contemplating entering training?

The experience we have had at the University of Manchester is that the situation for good postgraduate-trained bioinformatics students is very healthy. Companies are keen to take students for placements as part of their training. This is to the point at which we have more offers for placements than we have students to take them. As well as those in the UK and Europe, a number of companies in the USA are now offering placements. The job market is also strong. The majority of our students go directly into bioinformatics posts in industry, the rest going predominantly to PhD positions. Those who have tried to find work in the USA have found that the situation there is, if anything, better than in the UK, including one student who applied for eight jobs in the San Francisco area and was embarrassed to be offered all of them!

Protein Modification part 3 of 3

Ubiquitin in pro‑inflammatory signalling - chains of command
by:Karine Enesa and Paul C. Evans

The 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Aaron Chiechanover, Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose for their pioneering studies of ubiquitination and its role in regulating protein stability. Now, 30 years after their discovery, we are beginning to understand the pleiotropic nature of ubiquitin and its roles in diverse physiological processes. Here we review an emerging concept that the signalling pathways that control inflammation are tightly regulated by a multitude of ubiquitination and deubiquitination reactions.


Palmitoylation - putting on fat Marie-
by:José Bijlmakers

The modification of proteins by the attachment of palmitate is a reversible process that has profound effects on protein function. Although palmitoylation was first documented almost 30 years ago, it is still poorly understood. Progress in this field has been hampered by the elusive nature of the enzymes involved and the absence of an obvious consensus palmitoylation motif. However, major steps forward have recently been made. The cloning of two yeast enzymes revealed the existence of a family of palmitoyltransferases, and new techniques have been developed for the large-scale detection and identification of the palmitoyl-proteome.


Macromolecular crystallography - new light on protein structure
by: Armin Wagner

X‑ray diffraction is the method of choice to determine structural information from biological macromolecules to atomic resolution. This technique depends on the availability of single crystals of protein, which are notoriously difficult to produce. It can take months or even years to find crystallization conditions capable of producing crystals with sufficient diffraction quality. During the last few years the field of MX (macromolecular crystallography) has undergone considerable change and most of the steps from protein expression to structure solution have been automated, speeding up the process significantly. Facilities such as Diamond Light Source, the new UK synchrotron radiation source in Oxfordshire, have been developed to incorporate new automation technologies and Diamond will provide an important user resource for XRD (X‑ray diffraction) experiments on crystals of biological macromolecules. Furthermore, in collaboration with Professor So Iwata (Imperial College and Diamond Light Source) and funded by the Wellcome Trust, Diamond Light Source is developing a laboratory dedicated specifically to solving the structure of membrane proteins, the crystallization of which poses a particular problem to the crystallographer.