Vigorous disagreements and controversies in the literature about the molecular mechanisms of chaperone action do not reflect personal animosities, but are part of a carefully calculated ploy to raise the public profile of the field. This was the encouraging suggestion made by Costa Georgopoulos (University of Geneva, Switzerland) in opening the latest European Science Foundation Research Conference on the Biology of Molecular Chaperones*. The conference, the third in a series that began in 1991, provided delegates with an intensive four days of science (including over 50 talks and more than 100 posters) at an attractive beach hotel. The meeting introduced new chaperones such as NAC (the 'nascent polypeptide-associated complex') as well as the familiar GroE proteins and hspVOs, and even suggested new roles for almost-forgotten proteins such as 'trigger factor'. Subjects ranged from archae-bacteria to oats, from phage-coat-protein assembly to thermotolerance in mammalian cells, and from applying chaperones in refolding of recom-binant, high-value proteins, to using the expression of specific chaperones as indicators of tumour malignancy or environmental stress.
展开▼
