2013 INBRE Conference Features National HIV, Retrovirus Expert
Michael F. Summers, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The 2013 Conference for Arkansas IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence will take place Friday, Oct. 18, and Saturday, Oct. 19. The departments of physics, biological sciences and chemistry and biochemistry in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences will host attendees as well as keynote speaker professor Michael F. Summers.
Friday’s sessions will be held at various locations on the Fayetteville Square, and Saturday’s will be held on the University of Arkansas campus. See the full schedule for location and parking details.
Summers’ research at the University of Maryland’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute is aimed at understanding how retroviruses assemble and how they specifically recognize and package their genetic material. His keynote address, "Insights into the Mechanism of HIV-1 Assembly and Genome Packaging," will be held at 7:15 p.m. Friday in the Fayetteville Town Center.
According to his profile from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, over the past decade or so, Summers and others have determined the 3D structures of several isolated protein components that make up HIV-1 (the retrovirus that causes AIDS). The research focuses on understanding how these components interact with each other and with cellular constituents as well as how these intermolecular interactions change when the initially-formed retrovirus matures and becomes infectious. Ultimately, Summers and fellow researchers hope to use the basic structural and functional information obtained to design new therapeutic approaches for the treatment of AIDS and other human diseases caused by retroviruses.
Arkansas INBRE is funded by a grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, under the Institutional Development Award (IDeA) program of the National Institutes of Health. The IDeA program was established for the purpose of broadening the geographic distribution of NIH funding for biomedical and behavioral research.
This conference precedes the 2013 Southeast Regional IDeA Meeting, which will be hosted by the Arkansas INBRE and COBREs, will be held Nov. 15-17 at the Little Rock Marriott and the William J. Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock.
Topics
Contacts
Roger E. Koeppe II, distinguished professor
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
479-575-4976,
rk2@uark.edu
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