Category: Conferences

The second day at CALCON 2014 started with Matthew Auton (Mayo Clinic of Minnesota) receiving the “Sting Sunner Memorial Award”. He presented his work on the thermodynamics properties of the domains of the von Willebrand factor, which mutations results in the so-called von Willebrand disease, the most common inherent bleeding disorder in man.

During the plenary session, Heiko Heerklotz (University of Toronto) showed interesting results of ITC experiments titrating surfactant into lipidic liposomes and lipidic solution into micelles systems. Analysis of this complex isotherms provides information to characterize the phase boundaries between micellar phase, fluid, ordered and gel-phase membranes.

Joseph Emerson (Mississippi State University) presented his work in complex equilibria associated with metal ions coordination in dioxygen-activating enzymes. His group uses ITC data to understand how this enzymes discriminate between available metal ions.
The “hot topic” in the other thematic sessions and during the posters presentation continues being the study of structure and stability of DNA quadruplexes related to the human telomere sequence.
AFFINImeter presented the poster “AFFINImeter: A new tool to analyze Isothermal Titration Calorimetry experiments” where we showed how AFFINImeter opens up new possibilities for the application of the ITC technique such as:

 

 

The 69th Calorimetry Conference (CALCON 2014) hold in Santa Fe (New Mexico, USA) opened today with Peter R. Tremaine (University of Guelph) receiving the “Hugh M. Huffman Memorial Award”. In his opening lecture he reviewed his research on modeling the behaviour of aqueous systems near the critical point; where many geological and industrial processes take place: from nuclear reactors to the origin of life.
In the plenary session Thomas Record (University of Wisconsin) discussed the effect of the Hofmeister series salts in the interaction with biopolymers and Randy Black (Quantum Design Inc) presented a new calorimetry cell for their measurement system to measure heats exchanges at mK temperature.
Micheael Henzl (University of Misouri) opened the “Macromolecule-Ligand Interaction” session presenting the study of the effect of mutations of Parvalbumin on its interaction with different ions. Parvalbumin is a vertebrate-specific protein believed to function primarily as cytosolic Ca²⁺ buffers. He showed global analysis of different ITC isotherms using a competitive binding model for Ca²⁺ and Mg²⁺ , when both ions are loaded in the syringe of the ITC equipment.

Cocaine-binding DNA aptamers have been developed for use in biosensor applications as they can be selected to bind almost any target with high specificity and affinity. Philip Johnson (York University) showed ITC competitive experiments between cocaine and quinine to explain the mechanism of binding with this DNA apatmers.
During the “Acid Folding and Interactions” session, different students from the Lewis Biophysics Laboratory (Mississippi State University) presented their works on the interaction of G-quadruplex DNA, one of the promising anti-cancer targets, with different ligands. They showed complex ITC isotherms with two inflexion points which they analysed with a binding model that takes into account three different events: the binding of the first ligand, the unfolding of the G-quadruplex DNA structure and the binding of a second ligand.
Tomorrow AFFINImeter will be in the poster session presenting the poster “AFFINImeter: A new tool to analyze Isothermal Titration Calorimetry experiments”. On Wednesday we will present an oral communication on the same topic during the “Global Analysis, Modeling and Simulations” session.