IOCB Prague celebrated 70 years of its existence with a jubilee symposium, a one-day lecture festival covering some of the most historically significant research areas of IOCB and combining them with current cutting-edge science carried out at IOCB and lectures by distinguished guests from abroad.
70 years of IOCB Prague and beyond [Video]
[English and Czech captions included]
Program
Rich and famous history
The morning sessions of the jubilee symposium 70 years of IOCB Prague and beyond were dedicated to the rich and famous history of the IOCB.
The audience heard recollections of the successes and missed opportunities of peptide chemistry at IOCB by Michal Lebl and the beginnings of structural biology by Peter Štrop (ALX Oncology, USA), the history of steroid chemistry by Pavel Kočovský, nucleoside chemistry by Marcela Krečmerová, and chemistry of natural products by Irena Valterová, as well as a brief history of MS and NMR spectroscopy at IOCB by Josef Cvačka & Martin Dračínský.
Contemporary science
In the afternoon, some of the junior group leaders at IOCB presented their latest research.
Hana Cahová talked about non-canonical RNA caps and about discovering their role. Milan Vrábel spoke about some major achievements and challenges of bioorthogonal reactions. Tomáš Slanina presented his projects focused on water-soluble photoswitches and reversible photochemical systems which would be applied in chemical biology, molecular electronics, and material chemistry. Last but not least, Miloslav Polášek spoke about the huge potential of organic complexes of rare earth elements and new technologies developed in his group.
Invited lectures
We were also honored to welcome several distinguished guests from abroad.
Tomáš Cihlář, Senior Vice President Research, Virology in Gilead Sciences (USA) gave Tony Holý Lecture and talked about the past journey as well as the latest efforts in HIV drug discovery.
Marek Basler from the Biozentrum at the University of Basel (Switzerland) talked about spatial and temporal regulation of type VI secretion system in gram-negative bacteria.
Petra Schwille from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biophysics at Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (Germany) spoke about the latest results in accomplishing spontaneous division of vesicle-based artificial cells.
Poster session
The conference also included a poster session including IOCB research groups and other organizations of the IOCB family.
