The 6th annual Johns Hopkins Folding Meeting will be held 17-20 March 2001 at the Coolfont Conference Center, located about 2 hours from Baltimore and Washington in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. This meeting has attracted an international roster of participants representing the most prominent labs engaged in protein folding research. Efforts to understand RNA folding have made substantial progress in recent years and, to a large extent, RNA and protein folding share a common conceptual framework. There has been no effort to engage protein and RNA folding labs in sustained conversation, though the recent experience among labs at Johns Hopkins is that such dialog is mutually beneficial. For the 2001 and future meetings, discussion of RNA folding will be integrated into each session of the meeting. Five sessions of four speakers each are planned for 2001, on the topics of electrostatics, folding reaction pathways, dynamics, prediction and design, and folding problems posed by large complexes. In selecting participants for the meeting, Dr. Lattman will try to obtain representation from as many labs as possible and maintain a balance between junior and senior investigators, US and foreign participants, different experimental and theoretical approaches, and RNA vs. protein. Dr. Lattman anticipates approximately one quarter of the participants will be engaged in RNA-related research.
