2018

On the early morning on the 4th of May at Vienna Biocentrum campus the Ubiquitin club members started welcoming students and invited speakers for the 5th Ubiquitin & Friends symposium held in a recently built beautiful IMP building.

This year, members of the Vienna BioCenter decided to expand the size of the symposium. Approximately 100 people attended, making it a comfortable event and exciting way to spend the end of the working week. Attendees ranged from Masters students, PhD students, Post-docs to admired experts in the field from the campus and abroad. The symposium, like the Ubiquitin club, covered a broad range of topics, ranging from ubiquitin, ubiquitin-like molecules, signaling, autophagy, post-translational modifications, to directed protein degradation via small molecules.

Every year a special effort is made to invite known experts in the field. This year, we were very happy to welcome 5 highly distinguished guest speakers. Craig Crews from Yale University who talked about PROTAC-mediated Protein Degradation. Jan-Michael Peters from our campus who closed the first session with the talk about the role of ubiquitin system in control of chromosome segregation. Ami Navon from the Weizmann Institute who talked about his lab’s journey to understand a topic “Polyglutamine related aggregates serve as a potent antigen source for cellular immune response”. Third season opened Matthias Peter from ETH in Zürich who talked about Cullin-RING E3 ubiquitin ligases and their roles in cell proliferation. Every year students from Ubiquitin club have a chance to vote for their favorite speaker who is invited to Ubiquitin symposium. This year students from Ubiquitin club invited Terje Johanses who talked about regulation of the selective autophagy by Ubiquitin & Friends. In the last session Ron Hay from University Dundee talked about his lab effort to uncover “Mechanism of action of RING E3 ligases for ubiquitin and ubiquitin-like proteins”.

In addition to invited speakers, students also had an opportunity to present their projects selected based on the submitted abstracts. But that is not all. This year we had for the first time a poster session where our invited speakers took up the challenge to select the most exciting student/post-doc poster for the “Ubiquitin Award”, which included a certificate and a prize money. The award won Thomas Hermanns.
In addition to the award for the best poster, Ubiquitin club awarded students with 5 travel awards who were selected based on the submitted abstracts.
In the end of the symposium we enjoyed a nice dinner together to mark the end of this year’s successful event. During the dinner we had an award ceremony where all awards were hand over to the students.

The atmosphere of the symposium was great throughout the day, and was characterized by communicative and productive moments. During the allocated time for coffee breaks in between the talks, attendees discussed the wonderful science behind each of the talks. The external speakers especially left their mark, as they not only listened to each of the talks, but put a lot of effort into providing constructive advice and asking the many important of questions.

We hope to see you at the 6th "Ubiquitin and Friends" symposium!

Speakers from 5th Ubiquitin & Friends symposium:

Craig Crews, Yale University, USA
Jan-Michael Peters, IMP, Austria
Ami Navon, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Matthias Peter, ETH Zürich, Switzerland
Terje Johansen, Arctic University, Norway
Ron Hay, University Dundee, UK

“Ubiquitin Poster Award”:
Thomas Hermanns

“Ubiquitin travel award”:
Ricardo Canavate del Pino, University of Dundee
Miriam Martinez Cartro, University of Barcelona
Karim Marwah, Institute Pasteur
Andreas Müler, ETH Zürich
Andrea Princz, Crete