September 2009 EM Meetings

Christoph Best (PDBe) gave a presentation on how to deposit and retrieve data sets in the EMDB at the 10-day EMBO Course in Cryo-Electron Microscopy at Birkbeck College, London organized by Elena Orlova and Helen Saibil. By providing training lectures to students and postdocs working in cryo-electron microscopy, we hope to encourage more research groups to deposit their data and use the EMDB for their work. You can download and view Christoph's presentation here. The 7-17 September EMBO workshop also marked the end of the European Network of Excellence "Three-dimensional electron microscopy" (3DEM), which funded EMDB development and operation for the past five years.

Christoph also presented a poster at the First International Workshop on Structural Systems Biology at Hamburg University September 24-25 as a contribution to the "Systems Biology and INSTRUCT" topic. INSTRUCT is a proposed European Integrated Infrastructure for Structural Biology to support research throughout Europe during the next decade. Cryo-electron tomography is a major future technology for systems biology, as it would allow imaging whole cells at the molecular level, allowing investigation of major protein complexes in a near-native state. EMDB hosts a number of cryo-electron tomography data sets and is developing data representation and visualization tools.