Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) has a long history of evolving to meet new challenges of molecular biology. Past Keystone Symposia highlighting """"""""Frontiers of NMR in Molecular Biology"""""""" have made major contributions to the dissemination and promotion of new developments in the NMR field. This role will be even more important in a rapidly evolving genomic and post-genomic era. Already the challenge of providing structures of proteins on a genomic scale has produced new NMR approaches to efficient structure determination. The prospect of having more targets for the pharmaceutical industry has spawned new means of screening for molecular interactions. The realization that biological function often involves the interplay of groups of macromolecules in a dynamic setting has led to new methods for monitoring macromolecular interaction and motion. With new approaches and new realizations come additional challenges. Large volumes of data and new types of data demand innovative approaches to analysis, assemblies of interacting macromolecules means working with ever larger structures, and new sources of data on protein dynamics require new connections to mechanistic models. New technological advances needed to work with larger systems often come from a combination of the solids NMR and solution NMR fields. Computational biology is well poised to organize diverse types of data, generate molecular models, and turn them into predictive tools. The ultimate challenge for the meeting will be to stimulate discussion among scientists coming from these diverse fields. The meeting will highlight new approaches to the challenges defined above and provide a forum for discussion among molecular biologists, NMR spectroscopists, computational biologists, and drug design specialists. The program will be organized around problem areas and integrate talks by scientists having different perspectives on their solution. Scheduled breaks between formal presentation sessions are ideal for simulating discussion among participants, and promoting contact between students and established leaders in these diverse fields. Discussion of more practical aspects will be promoted by the organization of afternoon workshops having a less formal structure.
