Symposium Review

The14th CRG sympossium took place on the 22nd-23rd of October at the PRBB auditorium CRG. The sympossium featured talks of 19 speakers from some of the most important science centers of the world, and it was distributed in 4 sessions, dedicated to topics related to Cellular Machineries.

Both attendees and speakers expressed the value that had for them to attend the symposium, concluding that it was a great place for networking, meeting with old colleagues or making new acquiantances, and overall be updated on new discoveries and interesting information on their fields.

First day’s session was about Mechanochemistry of Cell Biology, and included talks about reconstruction of mitotic spindle organization by speaker Marileen Dogterom (Delf University of Technology, NL), tweaking cartwheel and centriole symmetry by Michel Steinmetz (Paul Scherrer Institute, CH), ER organization at increased resolution, by Jenniffer Lippincot-Schwartz (Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child, US) Induction of cellular invasion from centrosome amplification, by Susana Godinho (Barts Cancer Institute, UK) and short talks by Julia Von Blume, about cargo sorting during protein secretion (CRG Alumni, Max Planck, DE) and Eli Zamir, about building blocks and assembly of cell adhesion machineries (Max Planck, DE)

In the afternoon Session 2 about Morphogensis and cytoskeleton counted with 4 talks, Actin cortex mechanics in animal cell morphogenesis, by Eva Paluch (UCL, UK), radial Cell intercalations in zebrafish gastrulation, by Carl Philipp Heisenberg (Institute of Science and Technology, AT), Control of intracellular forces and cancer cell invasion by the adhesome, by Xavier Trepat (Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia) and last talk of the day by Anna Akhmanova, on Mycrotubule dynamics (UtrechtUniversity, NL)

By the end of Session 1, it was time for poster session, exposed outside the Auditorium building, that counted with 25 different posters from centers all over the world, on Cellular Machineries.

Day 2′s Session 3, Nuclear Organization, had no less interesting talks, starting with Manuel Mendoza ,CRG researcher and organizer of the symposium, on Modulation of gene repositioning controlling cell cycle entry, and was followed by speakers Camilla Sjögren (Karolinska Institutet, SE) on SMC protein complexes and Ulrike Kutay (ETH Zurich, CH) on Taking apart nuclear envelope during Open Mitosis. Two shorts talks closed the morning session, Gabriel Neurohr (CRG Alumni, MIT, US) about cell size limiting cell proliferation in yeast and Danny Nedialkova (Max Planck, DE) about optimization of codon translation rates maintaining proteome integrity.

Last Session of the Symposium, had 4 researchers speaking about Proteostasis: Protein folding homeostasis in the endoplasmatic reticulum by David Ron (University of Cambridge, UK), Autophagy machinery and role in suppression of diseases, by Tamotsu Yoshimori (Osaka University, JP), Proteasis impairment in protein misfolding and aggregation diseases, by Mark Hipp (Max Planck, DE) and Structure and function of an Escrt-III filament, by Wes Sundquist (University of Utah School of Medicine, US).

The 14th CRG Sympossium finished with the closing remarks of organizer Vivek Malhotra, inviting everybody to come back soon to Barcelona and the CRG, and expressing his admiration for both speakers and current PhD students attending the Sympossium.

You can now review, or watch for the first time, if you were not there, some of the talks in the VIDEOS section of the web, and feel free to let us know your thoughts on this year symposium on social Media. You can find us on FACEBOOK and TWITTER.