PENCE Proteocols The Official Newsletter of the Protein Engineering Network of Centres of Excellence The PENCE AGM & CPI 2003 Conference Wrap-up In This Issue The 2003 PENCE Annual General Meeting and the third annual AGM & CPI 2003 Wrap Up........1 meeting of the Canadian Proteomics Initiative (CPI 2003) were held The 2003 PENCE AGM..............1 st th May 21 to May 27 2003 at Vancouver’s Forest Sciences Centre, AGM & CPI 2004......................1 located on the University of British Columbia’s Main Campus. AGM Poster Prize Recipients...2 CPI 2003..................................3 The success of this years PENCE AGM as well as CPI 2003 CPI Poster Prize Winners........3 was evident from the large participant turnout (approximately 100 A Focus on New PENCE PIs: and 300 attendees respectively). A wonderful selection of seminars, David Vocadlo...........................4 posters, and tutorials helped to make this years conference an Congratulations to....................4 overwhelming success. Congratulations to the PENCE office staff HUPO/IUBMB............................4 for coordinating such excellent back-to-back conferences! 2002-2003 Annual Report.......4 NSERC Discovery Grants..........4 Recent Publications.................5 PENCE Welcomes The 2003 PENCE AGM Orly Weinberg..........................5 Financial & Statistical Info....5 The 2003 PENCE AGM began Wednesday May 21st with a INPEC 2003 Meeting................5 reception at the Gage Towers to give PIs and their students a chance Contributors............................5 to mix and mingle. On Thursday, May 22nd, the morning sessions of 2004 PENCE AGM & CPI 2004 the 2003 AGM began with an introduction of the first PENCE Supported Chair in Protein With the 2003 AGM and CPI Sciences Research, Justin meetings successfully behind us, it is MacDonald from the University time to start planning for 2004! The of Calgary. Following this 2004 PENCE AGM and CPI 2004 will introduction, PENCE PIs Sean be held in Montreal over the weekend Cutler, Guohui Lin, David of May 14th. Perrin, and David Rose spoke about the recently funded New Additional information will be Ideas Projects 1 through 4 A busy registration day, as the available shortly. In the meantime, respectively. After coffee, 2003 PENCE AGM gets please contact Ryan Leskiw by e-mail Andrew Emili and Nabil Seidah underway. ([email protected]) if you would provided the AGM participants like information on attending the 2004 with progress overviews on PENCE AGM and CPI 2004. We hope their PENCE funded projects. to see you there! To bring the participants up-to-date on the newly funded PENCE SARS Initiative, Rachel Roper, from the University of Victoria, provided an overview of coronaviruses and the SARS Bioinformatics Suite at www.sarsresearch.ca. Lindsay Eltis discussed his project studying the 3CL protease of Urbani Coronavirus and Jim Rini talked about approaches to production of Spike protein. After lunch and poster viewing, PENCE PIs Harry Schachter, Jim Rini, and Liang Li updated the AGM participants on their PENCE funded projects. Lawyer Roger Kuypers provided an overview of intellectual property issues for the PENCE PIs. The afternoon sessions were followed by a lively discussion on the future of PENCE, Conference attendees listening led by Steve Withers. The evening ended with a lovely BC salmon intently to Dr. Howard dinner at the Sage Bistro on the UBC Campus. Schachman’s talk entitled “Science Under Seige” at the On the morning of Friday, May 23rd, the 2003 PENCE AGM CPI 2003 Banquet. concluded with informal Project Group Meetings, and a tribute to the late Dr. Ian Clark-Lewis. Issue: 2003 June / July PENCE NETWORK NEWSLETTER 1 PENCE Proteocols The Official Newsletter of the Protein Engineering Network of Centres of Excellence 2003 PENCE AGM Poster Prize Recipients The 2003 PENCE AGM Poster Competition consisted of many outstanding posters, and as such, the competition for the poster prizes was tight. Among the contenders, Daniel Gauthier, Chris Tarling, and Rachel Roper came out on top, as first, second, and third-prize winners respectively. Congratulations to all of the winners! ****************************************************************************** First Prize – Daniel Gauthier Daniel Gauthier won First Prize at the 2003 PENCE AGM for his poster entitled Development of a non-discriminatory investigative approach for membrane proteins. Daniel is currently working in Dr. Claude Lazure’s lab at IRCM in the research unit on structure and metabolism of neuropeptides. They have been working on this novel method in order to bypass some of the current limitations in the study of membrane proteins using proteomics. Overall, they hope to get a clearer picture of the cell surface and a reliable means to identify those proteins involved in communication, transport, and interaction. In particular, Daniel would like to apply this technique to the study of spermatozoa-egg interaction in order to identify factors involved in fertilization, as this is the specific goal of his project. Daniel grew up in Varennes, a small town near Montreal. He completed his B.Sc. in biochemistry at McGill, and is now registered with the Division of Experimental Medicine, in McGill’s Faculty of Medicine. Daniel is also currently a member of the student committee at IRCM. In between all of his hard work Daniel enjoys playing tennis, riding his bike, and having a beer or two with colleagues and friends. Second Prize - Chris Tarling Chris’ poster entitled Identification of the Catalytic Machinery of a Family 29 Alpha-L-Fucosidase from Thermotoga Maritima Via Trapping of a Glycosyl- Enzyme Intermediate earned second prize in this year’s competition. This poster details how fucose-containing glycoconjugates are key antigenic determinants in many biological processes. A change in expression levels of the enzymes responsible for tailoring these glycoconjugates has been associated with many pathological conditions and it is therefore surprising that little information is known regarding the mechanism of action of these important catabolic enzymes. The catalytic nucleophile of this enzyme was identified to be Asp224 using a mechanism-based covalent inactivator. This result was confirmed by the 5000 fold lower activity (kcat/KM) of the site-directed mutant Asp224Ala, and the subsequent rescue of activity upon addition of exogenous nucleophiles. This research presents the first identification of the catalytic nucleophile of an Alpha-L-Fucosidase, a key step in the understanding of these important enzymes. Chris received his undergraduate degree from Bristol in 1994 and his PhD from Cambridge in 2000. Following the completion of his PhD, Chris started as a post-doc in Steve Withers lab at UBC, and in May 2003 Chris became a Research Associate in Dr. Withers group. In his spare time, Chris enjoys outdoor activities such as skiing, mountaineering, and climbing through the beautiful BC terrain. Third Prize - Rachel Roper The poster entitled The SARS Bioinformatics Suite details the SARS Bioinformatics website www.sarsresearch.ca, supported by PENCE and SAVI (BC SARS Accelerated Vaccine Initiative). This is a collaborative effort from the labs of Dr. Rachel Roper (Adjunct Assistant Professor) and Dr. Chris Upton (Associate Professor) at the University of Victoria. There are two computer programmers, Angelika Ehlers and Ryan Brodie, working on developing the bioinformatics software and website. Cristalle Watson, a Biochemistry & Microbiology co-op student is researching SARS and Coronavirus literature on processing of the polyprotein, doing protein analyses, and drawing diagrams of the virus genome and predicted membrane proteins in the virus particle. Vasily Tcherepanov is annotating new SARS genomes and analyzing the spike glycoprotein. Both Chris and Rachel have worked in poxvirus bioinformatics www.poxvirus.org and, together with lab members, have redesigned the software to analyze coronavirus genomes. This site is available for all SARS researchers. Issue: 2003 June / July PENCE NETWORK NEWSLETTER 2 PENCE Proteocols The Official Newsletter of the Protein Engineering Network of Centres of Excellence CPI 2003 CPI 2003 Poster Prize Winners The CPI 2003 program provided a great forum for the Federico Zahariev won first dissemination of cutting-edge research in proteomics and protein prize at the CPI 2003 conference for chemistry. his poster entitled “Theoretical Studies of the Catalytic Mechanisms of the After a lively and informative welcoming address by Martha Periplasmic Nitrate Reductase.” Piper, CPI 2003 was underway. Ruedi Aebersold brought the Federico is a post-doctoral fellow in the attendees up-to-date on recent advances in quantitative proteomics lab of Prof. Yan Alex Wang in the technologies, while John Aitchison described the application of Department of Chemistry at the systems biology to the study of University of British Columbia. peroxisome biogenesis and function. Katie Meehan won third Fiona Brinkman spoke prize for her poster entitled about the use of bioinformatics “Quantitation and Identification of analyses to reveal patterns in the Androgen-Regulated Proteins in evolution of microbial virulence. Prostate Cancer Cells Using Isotope- Mitsu Ikura described structural Coded Affinity Tags and Mass studies of protein-protein and protein- Spectrometry.” Katie is a post-doctoral ligand complexes while Natalie fellow in Dr. Marianne Sadar’s Strynadka discussed challenges and laboratory in the Department of approaches in the