We are pleased to join forces with the Dutch Association for Crystal Growth (DACG) for the Spring Symposium. The event will be hosted by Maastricht University on May 30 & 31, 2024, and registrations are open till May 15, 2024.
This event aims to provide ample opportunity for fruitful discussion and dialogues between experts from different fields of crystallization and to incite collaborations at the international level between the different disciplines on the area of nucleation, crystallization, crystal growth and self-assembly.
An early career event will be hosted on May 30, focusing on MSc, PhD students and postdocs future career opportunities. All participants to the early career gathering are kindly invited to bring a poster about their research. Please send your abstract before April 30, 2024 at info@dacg.nl. We will have two poster sessions dedicated to networking and brainstorming. Please indicate in your registration if you will be taking up this opportunity. The posters will remain in display throughout May 31st.
The DACG & NVK Spring Symposium will take place on May 31 featuring invited talks by renown researchers from the Netherlands and neighboring countries, contributed talks.
Congratulations to our member Sven Hennig and his colleagues Tom Grossmann (Biomimetic Chemistry) from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Saskia Neubacher (incircular) for the publications on the covalent bicyclization of quaternary protein complexes in Chem. Great work in which they show not only the successful crosslinking and stabilization of the Pseudomonas fluorescens esterase (Pfe) trimer via the INCYPRO technology, but also solved its crystal structure (PDB ID 8pi1).
A joint symposium of NVK together with DACG (Dutch Association for Crystal Growth) will be organized at the Science Campus of Maastricht University on 31 May 2024. On the afternoon before, 30 May, we will organize a satellite meeting for young researchers with an interesting evening program and overnight stay. Details following soon.
The obituary for Henk Schenk is published in the IUCr newsletter and can be found in Acta Crystallography A80, 2024: https://doi.org/10.1107/S2053273323010379. Henk Schenk was a founder, first president, and honorary member of the NVK.
On 24.11.2023 we held our annual general meeting of the NVK (ALV) at the Amsterdam Science Park organized by Roland Bliem and the ARCNL institute. Apart from the official ALV, the day was full of scientific talks and exchange, as we embedded it into our autumn symposium, this year on the topic of ‘Crystallography in Materials’. We had an exciting panel of speakers especially Ruud den Adel (Unilever), Tom de Vries (Nijmegen), Mirijam Zobel (Aachen), Alexey Pustovarenko (Malvern Panalytical), Adrian Graham (ESA/ESTEC) and Jarek Mazurek (Ardena).
A sphere impression of the day!
Special thanks belong to our speakers of the young researcher session (Grisha Shipunov (UvA), Falk Pabst (UvA) and Charlotte Vrolijk (Maastricht)), which was a great success and gave our next generation researcher a platform to discuss their achievements.
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Find the full program here. If you got curious, please join our next Symposium in Spring 2024! Details will follow.
It’s time again for the yearly NVK symposium and Algemene Leden Vergadering (ALV)! We cordially invite you to our autumn symposium focusing on ‘Crystallography in Materials’ at the Matrix ONE building in Amsterdam. Find more information and register here. Feel free to spread the word, and take your colleagues, students and fellow researcher along.
The triannual IUCr congress was held this time 22-29 August, 2023 in Australia, a long-distance travel for most crystallographers. The number of attendees was a bit lower than usual (~1800) but still respectable. This year the 75th Anniversary of the IUCr is celebrated. A very well attended session was devoted to short talks by several Executive committee members and IUCr officers giving their memories on the rich history of the IUCr.
13th Ewald Prize Lecture went to Wayne A. Hendrickson who delivered his lecture “Facing the Phase problem”. In his work he contributed to solving the phase problem for protein crystal structures with MAD and SAD techniques. He also mentioned the importance of the work of Prof. Bijvoet on anomalous scattering, our founding father of crystallography in the Netherlands. There were three plenary lectures, 29 key notes lectures and 8 parallel micro symposia, twice per day. In addition, there were poster sessions and the Software Fayre (organized by Martin Lutz) was running each day. One of the keynote lectures was given by our member Elias Vlieg (RU Nijmegen) on “X-ray crystallography of solid-liquid interfaces”. He showed very interesting phenomena are going on at crystal surfaces that can be well studied with X-ray crystallography. Elias is president of the DAGG, the Dutch Association of Crystal Growth, and I am happy to let you know that next year we will have a joint NVK-DAGG meeting!
The delegates were no longer provided with program and abstracts on paper; they were accessible through a congress app. Although quite handy to not be dragging around a heavy bag, it was very hard to really get a good overview of what was going on each day. The conference center was huge. When I arrived the first day and entered the front door, it turned out I had to walk another 1 km inside the building to arrive at the reception desk. It was very pleasant to meet colleagues in real life, talk to them over coffee and have lively discussions. It is a relive after having had the Corona restrictions. The exhibition was not as large as usual, surely because of the costs involved in traveling and exporting material to Australia. However, happily, a good number of sponsors were present anyway; I find the exhibitions are always the heart of the meeting. There was also a cute fluffy guest that could be petted.
An impression of Melbourne
The fluffy guest
Martin Lutz and I were the Dutch National Committee representatives to the General Assembly and we had three long evenings discussing withdrawal of adhering bodies (mostly for financial reasons), voting for nominations of commission members and notably the admission of The African Crystallographic Association (AfCA) as a Regional Associate of the International Union of Crystallography. There was also a report about the achievements of the various IUCr journals, a very important source of income for the IUCr. The next IUCr meeting will be in Calgary in 2026 and it was decided that the 28th IUCr congress will be held in Berlin in 2029.
The winters in Melbourne are not that bad, just like a poor summer in the Netherlands, so it was nice to walk back and forth to the conference center which was located on a relaxed pedestrian area with cafés and restaurants close to the Yarra river. All in all, I found the very long traveling time was worth the effort!
It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Henk Schenk on September 14th, 2023. Prof. Dr. Hendrik (Henk) Schenk was one of the founders, the first Chair and “erelid” (honorary member) of the NVK. Henk was a inspiring crystallographer, who will be remembered by many of us. Our thoughts are with his family.
Recently Sandra Eltschkner (one of our young members) published her work she performed during her postdoc in the lab of Helena Westerdahl at Lund University, Sweden. Sandra is very happy to introduce the topic to you herself:
“We recently published the first structure of a Major Histocompatibility complex class I (MHC I) from a wild songbird, the Great reed warbler, in complex with different peptide antigens. The Great reed warbler is a long-distance migratory bird that winters in Sub-Saharan Africa and breeds in the Western Palearctic (which includes Europe) in summer. Migratory birds encounter a variety of different pathogens at their breeding, stop-over and wintering sites, and hence their immune system needs to be especially well adapted. MHC-I molecules are central to the adaptive immune system in vertebrates, since they present antigens to CD8 + T-cells, thus enabling the detection of intracellular pathogens. Our structures reveal an unusual conformation of pathogen-derived antigens (peptides) in the peptide-binding groove of the MHC I molecule of the Great reed warbler and provide a first step towards understanding the extraordinary immune adaptation capacity of migratory birds.”
The paper is entitled The structure of songbird MHC class I reveals antigen binding that is flexible at the N-terminus and static at the C-terminus, is published in Frontiers Immunology and can be found through this link (reference: doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2023.1209059). The presented X-ray structures from the proteins presented in this paper can be found in the Protein Data Bank with accession codes 7ZQI and 7ZQJ.
Do you want to meet Sandra? She will be running the “Kristalfabriek” at the Open Day at Amsterdam Science Park on 7th of October. You will get the change to crystallise Lysozyme and look at your self-made crystals.
