Biochemical Journal Travel Bursary

Rene Jorgensen

I greatly appreciate the travel award granted by the Biochemical Journal, which made it possible for me to attend the ASBMB 2006 meeting in San Francisco. This was my first ASBMB meeting and also my first time in San Francisco and I have to say that I really enjoyed both. The number of posters as well as the number of talks at the meeting was overwhelming and I am sure I will be thumbing through the abstract book for some time to come. The meeting gave me the opportunity not only to meet some of the people that I only know by name from their publications but also to catch up with some of the people I got to know when working as a PhD student. Needless to say, there were a lot of very interesting speakers at the meeting, which I really enjoyed. In particular, the talk by Donald M. Engelman from Yale University on pH-triggered transport of molecules into cells was extremely interesting. His work is somewhat related to the import mechanism of some bacterial toxins, something with which our lab is also involved.

Rene Jorgensen pictured here with Sharon Schendel, Administrative Editor, Biochemical Journal USA

However, what turned out to be particularly fruitful to me at this meeting was to just walk up and down the countless aisles of posters. As a crystallographer, I am often faced with problems such as low protein expression, impure or insoluble protein, and poorly diffracting crystals. Problems to which the polished talks by the keynote speakers will not provide the answers. The poster sessions gave me the perfect chance to meet a lot of excellent researchers who are doing some very impressive and interesting work. I received a lot of good advice and valuable information, which I could not wait to get home and apply to my own experiments. Fortunately the meeting organizers allowed plenty of time in between the two daily talk sessions to attend the poster session and I really appreciated that. Because of the many interesting posters there were even days where I ended up skipping lunch. Last but not least, it was a pleasure to meet some of the people from the Biochemical Journal and once again I offer my sincere thanks to the Biochemical Journal for this great and rewarding opportunity. I had some fantastic days in San Francisco and while I never made it to the Alcatraz or the Golden Gate Bridge I definitely got a good taste of this fantastic city.