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Autumn Meeting 2014 – Intro from Steve Maginn CCDC

** REGISTER SOON!! **

The 2014 Autumn Meeting will take place on Tuesday 30th September at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry, Lensfield Road, Cambridge, jointly hosted by the University’s Chemistry Department and the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC). The meeting has a loose theme of Protein-Ligand Binding for Drug Discovery. Registration begins at 9am, and after some words of welcome and group business, we kick off the scientific presentations at 9.45am with Dr Jason Cole, Deputy Director of the CCDC, who will talk about the generation of molecular conformations based on crystallographic knowledge. Yi Mok, from the Institute of Cancer Research in London, will then present his work on medicinal chemistry-relevant space in fragment screening.

As ever with our meetings, there will be poster presentations to be seen and enjoyed in the breaks and over lunch, and the tradition of flash talks advertising these posters will be continued in Cambridge. This time the presentations will follow Yi Mok’s talk and immediately precede the morning coffee break, so that attendees can prioritise which posters they would like to spend more time with a little earlier.

Following the break, Y.K. Motamedi from Andreas Bender’s research group in the Department of Chemistry at Cambridge will talk about a targeted approach to drug repositioning, and then to take us up to the lunch break, we will have two presentations which follow up posters from the Spring meeting at Eli Lilly. Firstly, Samuel Webb from LHASA (who won the poster prize at Eli Lilly) will expand on his work on feature combinations networks, and then the technique of Matched Molecular Series will be the topic of a joint presentation from Noel O’Boyle of Next Move Software and Jonas Bostrom from AstraZeneca in Sweden.

After lunch, Alicia Higuerelo from Sir Tom Blundell’s Cambridge research group will present an evolutionary look at protein-ligand interactions, Andrea Bortolato of Heptares Therapeutics will examine the role of solvent (usually water!) in protein-ligand binding, and finally Gerard Van Westen from the EBI at Hinxton will talk about allosteric binding. And before we finish and enjoy a final tea and coffee, a prize for the best poster will be presented.

Further information about the meeting, some practicalities, information about a meal the evening before the meeting for those who will be in the Cambridge area that night, and registration can all be found on the group’s website at http://www.ukqsar.org/2014/07/07/autumn-2014/ . We’re looking forward very much to welcoming you in Cambridge!

Local Organisers – Steve Maginn and Andreas Bender