Rejkavic, Iceland
2012 Rejkavic, Iceland
The land of the midnight sun welcomed the Vallee Foundation for a symposium on Molecular Machines in August 2012. Some 50 delegates journeyed from Europe and the USA to this beautiful island of mountains and geysers, perched halfway between the two continents. Speakers included:
- Stephen Benkovic (The Pennsylvania State University): Issues in DNA Replication: Primosome Function and Reconstitution of Holoenzyme
- Antoine van Oijen (University of Gröningen): Under the Hood: Single-Molecule Studies of DNA Replication
- Patrick Cramer (Ludwig-Maximilians University): Gene Transcription: from Molecular Movies to Regulatory Systems
- Seth Darst (Rockefeller University): Structures of Bacterial RNA Polymerase Paused Elongation Complexes
- Marina Rodnina (Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry): The Assembly Landscape of Translation Initiation Complexes in Bacteria
- Toshio Yanagida (Osaka University): Single Molecule Imaging: Towards the Whole Cell Modeling
- Ronald Vale (University of California, San Francisco): Molecular Mechanisms of Cytoskeletal Motor Proteins
- Thomas Südhof (Stanford University): The Presynaptic Nerve Terminal as a Secretory Nano-Machine
- Larry Goldstein (University of California, San Diego): Using Human Stem Cells to Probe the Role of Transport and Sorting in Alzheimer's Disease
- Helen Hobbs (University of Texas Southwestern): Nature Plus Nurture = NAFLD: Genes, Environment and Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease
- Kári Stefánsson (deCODE): The Genetics of Common Diseases of Man
The extraordinary landscape beyond the windows of the conference center beckoned at the end of the day. Evenings are long at that time of year and discussions about the science spilled outside and late into the night.