The great wall symposium

摘要

The third Great Wall Symposium recently held in Paris, France, featured the latest advances in the field of peptidoglycan metabolism. We hosted two Keynote lectures by Kevin D. Young and Alexander Tomasz, as well as 24 speakers in six different sessions. The meeting attracted a great deal of interest from the scientific community, which has expanded dramatically in the last decade. The remerged interest in the field of peptidoglycan research occurred around the year 2000 with two important discoveries: (1) the characterization of bacterial cytoskeleton and their role in cell wall synthesis, and (2) the discovery of innate immune receptors in Drosophila (through peptidoglycan recognition proteins) and in mammals (through the Nod proteins) involved in sensing of peptidoglycan. As a consequence of the rediscovered interest in peptidoglycan by microbiologists, cell biologists, and immunologists, a first meeting exclusively focused on peptidoglycan research was organized in Baeza, Spain, October 4-6, 2010. This first small meeting answered the real need for a discussion platform of the peptidoglycan community, and a second meeting followed a year later in Lisbon, Portugal, September 28-30, 2011.