(taken from the application) Funds are requested to subsidize the cost of registration for postdoctoral associates and graduate students who will attend the Ninth International Conference on Biological Inorganic Chemistry (ICBIC9) on July I I-16, 1999 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The ICBIC conferences held biennially in different parts of the world are the premier conferences in biological inorganic chemistry. Their purpose is to bring biochemists and biologists who use a variety of techniques to investigate the role of metal ions (from metalloenzyme structure and mechanisms to gene regulation) together with inorganic chemists who build model compounds to mimic these systems and provide further insights. This meeting attracts leaders in this very active field of research. There are many recent findings that metalloenzymes play important roles in metabolism and that defects in these proteins can cause disease. By studying the structure-activity relationships of these proteins and their inhibition and inactivation mechanisms, we are beginning to understand the structural bases of disease. We are trying to broaden the scope of our conference by including pharmaceutical people and those interested in disease states. Accordingly, we have set up sessions that put speakers together along nontraditional lines. Rather than categorizing sessions according to active site metal as in the two previous ICBICs, most sessions will emphasize functional similarities. Topics of possible interest to NIH are: 1) metal cofactor assembly, 2) protein radicals, 3) molecular oxygen activation and oxygen intermediates, 4) sensing and signaling, 5) metal metabolism, 6) ribozymes, 7) metals in medicine, 8) peptide processing, 9) long-range transfer, and 10) molecular oxygen toxicity There are sessions on metal metabolism and two speakers are leaders in the ferritin field: Elizabeth Theil, and Annie Powell (University of Norwich) who works on ferritin models. In addition, the program is heavily slanted towards iron containing proteins, and understanding their chemistry is the focus of our conference. Specifically, one speaker, Eckard Munck, is using Mossbauer spectroscopy to follow iron metabolism in cells, and another, Jerry Kaplan, is studying iron metabolism in yeast as a model for metal diseases in more advanced organisms. With respect to the broader goals of NIDDK, Dr. Alan Shaver of Montreal is speaking on insulin mimetics, and proteins related to Wilson's disease, Menke's disease and diphtheria are discussed in the session """"""""Metalloproteins in Disease"""""""". Finally, some lecturers are supported by NIDDK such as Ed Solomon (a plenary lecturer), Bob Hausinger, Jerry Kaplan, Frank Raushel, Elizabeth Theil, and Joan Valentine.
