| Abstrakt: |
On October 11-13, 2006, approximately 300 people participated in the workshops and scientific sessions of the 33rd Annual Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory Users' Meeting (SSRL33), held at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California. SSRL33 was chaired by Christopher S. Kim (Chapman U.) and Aaron Lindenberg (SSRL). In the opening session, SLAC Deputy Director Keith Hodgson welcomed meeting participants with introductory remarks, including a summary of the transcription research by Roger Kornberg (Stanford University), who received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Kornberg's studies provide an understanding at the atomic level of how the process of transcription occurs and also how it is controlled. As transcriptional regulation underlies all aspects of cellular metabolism, Kornberg's work helps explain how the process sometimes goes awry, leading to birth defects, cancer and other diseases. Key to this understanding has been the determination of the three-dimensional arrangement of the atoms in the RNA polymerase through the use of synchrotron radiation-based macromolecular crystallography, a significant part of which was conducted at SSRL's beam lines, starting as early as 1991. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
