By Heather Hobbs


BRINGING YOU THE LATEST NEWS & EVENTS FROM THE SCIENCE INDUSTRY


MRC Scientist Wins 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry


Our congratulations go to Richard Henderson of the MRC’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) who has been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, alongside Professor Jacques Dubochet and Dr Joachim Frank (LMB alumnus) “for developing cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution.”


This is the eleventh Nobel Prize awarded for work undertaken at the LMB, which has earned the nickname of ‘the Nobel Prize factory’. Since its establishment over 100 years ago, the total number of Nobel prizes awarded to MRC-funded scientists is now 23. Richard will receive his Nobel Prize in Sweden in December, the MRC were delighted to announce.


Born and educated in Scotland, Richard received a PhD at Cambridge then worked at Yale University before returning to the LMB where, since 1973, his work has helped to advance the use of electron microscopy to solve complex membrane protein structures. Together with Nigel Unwin he successfully


determined the first structure of 2-D crystals of the membrane protein bacteriorhodopsin using electron microscopy in 1975. This insight and Richard’s drive and determination over the next two decades led to the development of better detectors for electron microscopes and better software to analyse the images. This revolutionised the technique of cryo-EM, which involves flash-cooling molecules in a thin layer of aqueous solution before imaging them, a crucial method invented by Jacques Dubochet and his colleagues in the early 1980s. Computational processing the images is a key step, to which Joachim Frank made major early contributions.


Richard has been presented with many awards for his work and was recently awarded the Gjonnes Medal in electron crystallography by the International Union of Crystallography. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences, and was Director of the LMB from 1996-2006.


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MRC LMB Biologist Richard Henderson. Pic credit: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology


PEFTEC 2017 Announces Seminar Program seminars are available from www.peftec.com.


Located at the Antwerp Expo in Belgium, PEFTEC 2017 will be situated at the centre of one the world’s largest clusters of petrochemical companies, and will include 4 Conferences focusing on analytical techniques, environmental monitoring, methane measurement and safety issues in hazardous situations.


The organisers of PEFTEC 2017 have published details of a comprehensive series of seminars that will follow the event’s themes of testing, analysis and monitoring in the petrochemical sectors.


Running throughout both days of the event, a program of over 60 seminars will operate from 8 different seminar rooms within the Exhibition hall. The seminars will operate on a walk-in, walk-out basis, offering visitors the opportunity to select the subject matter of greatest interest. The seminars will address an enormous variety of subjects, covering techniques, methods, standards and cases studies in laboratory analysis, process monitoring and environmental monitoring. Abstracts for all of the


In addition to the event’s Conferences, Exhibition and Seminars, PEFTEC 2017 will also feature a Poster Display Area in which researchers from both academia and industry will publish the results of their latest work.


The cost of admission to the PEFTEC Conferences is €125/ day, but entry to the Exhibition is free of charge for those that pre-register at www.peftec.com.


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Call for Entries: Eppendorf Award 2018


From 1 October 2017 until 15 January 2018, young researchers not older than 35 years, with an advanced degree, who are working in Europe can apply for the Eppendorf Award for Young European Investigators. This highly prestigious €20,000 prize acknowledges outstanding contributions to biomedical research in Europe based on methods of molecular biology, including novel analytical concepts.


The winner is selected by an independent expert committee chaired by Reinhard Jahn (Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany).


The Award winner 2018 will receive: • Prize money of €20,000


• An invitation to the prize ceremony at the EMBL Advanced Training Centre in Heidelberg, Germany, on 21 June 2018 • An invitation to visit Eppendorf AG in Hamburg, Germany


• Coverage of his/her work by Nature in print and online (including a podcast)


Full details on the Eppendorf Award for Young European Investigators, the selection criteria and Award winners since 1995 can be found at www.eppendorf.com/award.


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