The ELIXIR IDP Community F2F/hybrid meeting takes place from 10:00 CEST to  18:00 CEST on Monday, May 13th 2024. This meeting is planned as a hybrid meeting, with the F2F component at the Onoma Hotel (Monastiriou 24, 546 29) in Thessaloniki, Greece.

The meeting will be held immediately before the COST Action ML4NG 2nd Main Conference (14-17 May).

Preliminary Agenda

CONTEXT
The ELIXIR IDP Community for Intrinsically Disordered Proteins (IDPs) aims to develop standards, tools and resources to accelerate the identification, analysis and functional characterisation of IDPs, i.e. proteins containing regions that lack a stable secondary or tertiary structure and that are thought to be involved in many human diseases, including cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Recent developments in structure prediction, exemplified by the AlphaFold algorithm, have opened up new challenges in protein modelling. Key challenges lie ahead in capturing protein dynamics and understanding how the context of a protein (mutations, modifications, environmental conditions, etc.) influences its conformational behaviour. A crucial factor in achieving this is the way we describe and capture conformational ensembles. This presents a serious challenge, as such representations have to cover a wide range of protein behaviour, from local switches between a few well-defined alternative conformations to intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) that sample an immense number of conformations in a random walk-like manner.

While the prediction of conformational switches has recently made significant progress, as illustrated in the last Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP), the second challenge of modelling IDPs remains largely unresolved due to the conformational and experimental uncertainty surrounding such dynamic molecular systems.

The ELIXIR IDP Community annual meeting of 2024 aims to unite experimentalists and method developers to discuss these challenges and define joint opportunities. The first two sessions of the meeting will focus on training for IDP curation, ontologies, MIADE, and the consolidation of different IDP databases, while the last two sessions will shape our alignment with other consortia and outline our new whitepaper.

By bringing together these two communities, we hope to identify the opportunities and limitations of critically assessing IDP ensembles, thus making progress towards resolving the outstanding challenges in this field.

This meeting has a limit of in-person attendees of 40 participants, with no-limit on virtual participant numbers. A number of selected invited participants will receive funding to attend the meeting. These will be specifically informed regarding the reimbursement arrangements. 

Additional Registration information

Please note, if you have selected to attend face to face, this option is limited to first come first served basis. All registrants will be informed via email regarding their registration. Please do not book any travel till after you have been notified. 

Travel and venue

Once notified of your F2F attendance you will be expected to make your own travel and accommodation arrangements to the venue, reimbursement information will be shared with invited attendees after their successful registration.

Recommended accommodation (please consider shared reimbursement rules):

Onoma Hotel (Monastiriou 24, 546 29) in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Registration opening: 15 March 2024

Registration deadline:
    In presence participation: 15 April 2024
    Remote participation: 10 May 2024

Contacts:

Deepti Jaiswal Kundu: deepti.jaiswal-kundu@elixir-europe.org