Conference: 2024 Intrinsically Disordered Proteins GRS

The 2024 Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) on Intrinsically Disordered Proteins (IDPs) is being held at the Les Diablerets Conference Center in Switzerland on June 22-23, 2024. This will be the fifth of a series of biannual conferences primarily attended by a diverse group of graduate students and postdocs. This seminar will bring together trainees from a wide range of disciplines to discuss current directions in the IDP field, as well as examine the interdisciplinary experimental and conceptual demands of contemporary IDP research.

The GRS provides an ideal setting to facilitate international and interdisciplinary collaboration. It will also provide key networking opportunities, as well as allowing a range of different perspectives to be discussed and compared - a key aspect for such a broad and diverse field.

The 2024 IDP GRS is focused on the biophysics and biology of intrinsically disordered proteins. The GRS program features three formal sessions, one featuring a keynote speaker and two trainee-led sessions curated from abstract-selected talks. The three scientific oral presentation sessions highlight contemporary questions in the IDP field that have emerged from these cross-disciplinary conversations.

There are also two poster sessions and a mentorship panel covering academic funding acquisition. The meeting will feature a small number of attendees (up to 90 participants). The keynote speaker will discuss disordered sensing from basic principles to the de novo sensor design.

The first trainee-led session will highlight the recent discoveries enabled by studying IDP-mediated phenomena

through a lens of polymer physics, biophysics, and biochemistry. The second trainee-led session will focus on the emergent properties that can arise when disordered proteins generate higher-order assemblies in the physical sense, such as multiprotein structures, biomolecular condensates, fibrils, aggregates, and cellular phenomena regulated by these assemblies.

This session will also cover the interplay of these IDR-driven assemblies in cellular and organismal biology. The final session of the GRS is reserved for a mentoring panel where trainees can freely ask questions and engage in open discussion with a select group of faculty members. This panel is designed to help trainees better understand the grantsmanship process across career stages.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.