Wednesday, January 15, 2025
1/15/2025
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Conference on Protein Homeostasis in Health and Disease April 24 - 28, 2024 ABSTRACT This proposal is a request for financial support for a meeting on PROTEIN HOMEOSTASIS IN HEALTH AND DISEASE to be held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from April 24 - 28, 2024. This meeting is the premier international forum for presentation of new results in this exciting area across biology and medicine and is attended by representatives from virtually every major laboratory in the field. The explosion of new information on how the folded state of proteins is acquired and maintained in vivo and the relevance of this process to essentially all biological processes for healthy aging and risk for degenerative diseases of aging including neurodegeneration, cancer, and metabolism guarantees an excitement and urgency of this meeting. Because of the recent developments on stress signaling in aging and disease, we will open the meeting with this session to integrate across diverse forms of cell stress responses followed by sessions on chaperone mechanisms and co-translational folding and ribosome quality control. We will then explore the roles of stress granules and phase transitions, protein degradative mechanisms, organellar proteostasis and misfolding and aggregation in aging and neurodegenerative diseases. We will close with a session on therapeutic strategies for protein conformational diseases of aging. These fundamental questions are at the heart of the biology of proteostasis that will be complemented by the sessions on aging and proteostasis failure in diseases of protein misfolding including Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease. The themes of aging, proteostasis failure, and diseases of protein misfolding are well integrated throughout each session, and emerging principles on protein client interactions and alternate protein conformations will be dominantly displayed. The diverse protein quality control strategies used by compartments of the cell to ensure the integrity of the secretory and organellar pathways during times of protein folding stress will be represented by emerging topics on spatial quality control within a cell. The field of heat shock proteins and molecular chaperones has grown exponentially and draws interest not only from traditional scientific disciplines in the basic sciences but also from diverse areas of biomedical research including neurodegenerative disease, infectious diseases, cancer, heart disease and aging. The meeting will have eight lecture sessions, two poster sessions, two lightning presentation sessions, a (new) panel discussion on careers in science and a daily lunch with the speakers. The sessions include: 1) Cell Stress Response in Biology, Aging and Disease; 2) Chaperone Mechanisms; 3) Co- translational Folding and Ribosome Quality Control; 4) Stress Granules, Phase Transitions and Intrinsically Disordered Proteins; 5) Degradation Mechanisms - Autophagy Lysosomal Pathway and the Ubiquitin Proteasome System; 6) Misfolding and Aggregation in Aging and Neurodegenerative Diseases; 7) Organellar Proteostasis and Spatial Quality Control in Aging and Disease; and 8) Therapeutic Strategies for Protein Conformational Diseases of Aging. Each session will consist of eight to nine oral presentations and will be co-chaired by an invited speaker. Generally, two speakers will be pre-invited per session with the remainder to be selected from submitted abstracts, thus ~60-65% of speakers will be from submitted abstracts to ensure balance of junior investigators, gender, and all forms of diversity. As well, we will have two lightning sessions, each with ten talks each of 2 min. to highlight key presentations from the poster sessions. This balance of talks allows the meeting to feature presentations by leading scientists, to be responsive to exciting new developments, and to encourage diverse participation that recognizes new investigators.
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