I attended the first ERC Grantees Conference at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg last month, to hear about the research of recent winners of ERC starting and advanced grants in chemistry. The conference was proposed and organized by two chemists at the Institut Charles Sadron of Strasbourg: Nicolas Giuseppone and Jean-François Lutz.
The first two days began with plenary lectures by Jean-Marie Lehn and Ben Feringa, sponsored by Angewandte Chemie (Wiley) and NJC (RSC), respectively. The presentations by 24 grantees of the 2007–2011 grant period were strongly oriented towards complex systems, both chemical and biological.
European Research Council officials were also on hand to present the grants program and give an update on what to expect in the coming proposal period.
Conference participants board the sightseeing boat in front of the European Parlement that will take them to the conference dinner.
On Friday evening, a boat ride on the Ill river flowing through the center of Strasbourg took participants to the conference dinner held at the historic Maison Kammerzell, next to the cathedral.
The next morning, the younger participants eagerly awaited the announcement of the four poster prizes, provided by three scientific publishers (Nature, Wiley and the RSC for NJC). Dr Yan-Jun Liu, a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Damien Baigl (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris) won the NJC prize. Her poster was entitled “High-yield preparation of proteo-liposomes: a synthetic biology approach”.
Yan-Jun synthesized membrane proteins from a synthetic gene using a reconstituted, cell-free gene expression medium in the presence of well-defined giant liposomes, which results in the direct incorporation of the expressed proteins in the membrane of the giant liposomes. This method, which does not require any purification step, leads to the preparation of a large number of giant liposomes readily functionalized with target membrane proteins. This will be very useful to prepare reconstituted functional biomimetic systems as well as to investigate the properties of membrane proteins in vitro.
NJC Editor Denise Parent and poster prize winner Yan-Jun Liu, with organizer Nicolas Giuseppone looking on.
This work reflects Yan-Jun’s interest in interdisciplinary approaches combining chemistry, microfluidics and cell biology. She has worked on reconstituted systems (such as these proteo-liposomes), functional materials (nanoparticle synthesis for cell detection), surface chemistry (light-triggerable substrate for cell adhesion), and microfluidics for cell biology (cell polarity and cell migration).
Congratulations to Nicolas and Jean-François for an exciting meeting, and to the young winners for continuing success in their research!
Thanks to Yves Ruff for the photos.
