Key Dates

The Congress will offer you a unique Crystallographic experience, and set against the backdrop of the Food and Wine, Sport and Science super city that is Melbourne, we know it is going to be an event not to be missed!

Lock 21 – 29 August 2023 in your diaries now and stay connected by registering your expression of interest and prepare to turn crystallography upside down.

Marvellous Melbourne

A packed agenda of food, wine, sports and arts as your introduction to the best of Melbourne – from its creative, exciting city centre, to its buzzing neighbourhood hubs. It's the gateway to Victoria's world-class wineries, natural springs, peninsulas, spectacular coastline and alpine villages, making it the ideal destination for easy access to pre and post Congress touring.

Visitors will find Melbourne an exciting city to explore. Modern architecture and design is juxtaposed with heritage buildings reflecting Australia’s cultural history. But beneath the city’s impressive façade, lies the true heart and soul of the city; laneways which snake the city grid to reveal cafes and bars, fashion houses, boutiques, innovative cuisine, galleries, theatres and museums.

Melbourne has a lively passion for social eating and drinking, which is reflected in the thousands of restaurants serving up gastronomic experiences from around the world. Everywhere you will uncover a vast array of fashionable cafes, where you can enjoy Melbourne's existential coffee and cafe culture to the fullest.

Seize the moment while you can, and join us at the Congress in this incredible city!

Report of the 47th Lorne Proteins Conference
6-10 February 2022
by Daniel Eriksson and Michael Parker

The famous Lorne Proteins conference, now in its 47th year, is Australia’s premier protein science conference and a favourite haunt for crystallographers from around Australia and New Zealand. Lorne is a small coastal town just over 2 hours’ drive from Melbourne. Here, the waves of the Pacific Ocean can be heard lapping the beach just outside the conference venue. Like past years, there has been a feast of structural biology presented at the conference. Invited talks from local structural biologists included Alastair Stewart (F1-ATPase), Onisha Patel (DCLK1 kinase), Stephanie Gras (T-cells and COVID), Josh Hardy (flaviviruses), Katrina Black (potassium channels), Berhard Lechtenberg (ubiquitin ligases), Andrew Ellisdon (neurofibromin), David Thal (muscarinic receptors), Rhiannon Morris (LNK kinase), Thomas Ve (SARM1) and Alisa Glukhova (adenosine receptors).

Professor Leann Tilley capped a busy program by giving this year’s Leach Lecture. Leann, The Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry & Pharmacology at The University of Melbourne, gave a molecular imaging retrospective as told through the lens of decades of malaria research. The Leach medal, Australia’s highest honour in protein science, is traditionally awarded on the first day of the conference but was moved to the last day, to ensure it ended on a high while COVID-19 interferes with many of the speakers’ travels.

Simon Joshua “Syd” Leach, whose name the medal and lecture now grace, was instrumental to what would become an annual conference at the coastal town Lorne. The town itself is located on a heritage listed 240 kilometre stretch of road called the Great Ocean Road, that hugs the rugged coastline of Victoria. The first conference, convened in 1976, attracted sixty-five participants from Victorian universities and institutes. Participation has grown since then and this year Lorne saw 217 in-person attendees and an additional 169 participating remotely. Since 1986, when Syd Leach stepped down from the Organising Committee, there has always been a keynote speech known as the Leach lecture, with the accompanying medal awarded from 2004. Past Leach lecturers include many well-known to the IUCr community including Peter Colman, Mitchell Guss, Robert Huber, Jose Varghese, Ted Baker, Brain Matthews, Eleanor Dodson, Jenny Martin and Mike Lawrence.

While the Leach Medal recognises life-time accomplishments the Anders Young Investigator Award celebrates our up-and-coming stars. Named after Robin Anders, who chaired the Lorne Organising committee for 15 years this session moved to the first day on Sunday evening. This preceded the newly established Sparrow Session, celebrating our mid-career researchers and made for an exciting first day of science delivered almost completely in person rather than by video link. The Sparrow Session is named after Lyndsay Sparrow, who has attended every single Lorne Proteins Conference since inception, and he was pleasingly there to chair the first session!

This year the conference was joined by an embedded satellite meeting on computational biology, which covered a range of computational biology topics, a particular focus on the simulation of proteins and other biological systems. As well as talks, there were hands-on workshops on topics such as AlphaFold and molecular dynamics simulations, in silico mutational scanning as well as virtual screening. The augmented and virtual reality session was especially topical given the strong remote conference attendance.

Sadly, with international borders still closed at that time (they opened fully to visitors from the 21 February 2022) we were unable to welcome our international speakers in person. However, 15 speakers gave talks with live Q & A through video link during the conference. Highlights included Elizabeth Villa’s (University of California San Diego, USA) talk on cryo-electron tomography and Jeanne Stachowiak’s (University of Texas, USA) creative approach to uncovering how proteins sense membrane curvature. Amy Yewdall (Radboud University, The Netherlands) took us into condensates in the nucleus, which Adrian Elcock (University of Iowa, USA) took us on his journey towards developing the capabilities of simulating an entire cell. Hao Wu (Boston Children’s Hospital, USA) wowed with new inflammasome structures and Mimi Ho (Columbia University, USA) cautioned us not to throw out precious lysate from parasites because you might just find a protein structure by doing a little fractionation and putting it on it cryo-EM grid!

On that note, a series of European seminars were appropriately scheduled. A sufficiently late evening on this longitude is, after all, a reasonable time of day for our European colleagues. Featured in this session was Professor Robert Tampè from Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, who gave the EMBO Keynote Lecture.

All in all, another wonderful entry in a long tradition of Lorne conferencing and certainly worthy of Syd’s legacy!