: Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) has a long history of evolving to meet new challenges of molecular biology; this evolution will be and need to be even more rapid in a genomic and post-genomic era. Already the challenge of providing structures of proteins on a genomic scale has produced new NMR approaches for fast structure determination and the prospect of having more targets for the pharmaceutical industry has spawned new NMR based means of screening for molecular interactions. These aspects will place new demands for working with large complex data sets. Further, NMR is expanding into biologically and medically important areas such as integrated systems biology and metabonomics. The realization that biological function often involves the interplay of groups of macromolecules in a dynamic setting demands new methods for monitoring macromolecular interaction in large systems as well as motion in these systems. The advances needed often come from discussions among scientists expert in solid NMR, macromolecular solution NMR, molecular biology and drug discovery. The ultimate challenge for the meeting will be to stimulate discussion among scientists representing these diverse fields. The meeting will be largely organized around 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. This will be a timely and innovative meeting in this important field with wide interest and applicability to many areas ranging across fields as diverse as NMR studies of membrane proteins, NMR in integrated systems biology, the study of large proteins and large protein assemblies, new experimental and computational approaches to structural genomics, new methods in biological NMR, including applications of solid-state NMR, the study of motions in proteins and nucleic acids, and the discussion of important new areas where NMR can make especially important contributions such as protein folding and protein folding diseases.
