Looking back on 1993, it is clear that it was a time of growth and accomplishment for the Association. The centerpiece of the past year was a significant expansion of the program for our annual meeting and an increased participation in the Protein Society Meeting. This included six workshops and a tutorial on Saturday, the organization of a Monday evening workshop on "Peptide Libraries" and our second year as organizers of the Protein Society poster sessions. We also organized or participated in workshops at the annual ASBMB meeting and the American Peptide Society meeting, increased our efforts to call attention to the crisis in instrumentation funding, and established two new research committees. In addition to a Carbohydrate Analysis Research Committee that is now established and beginning work, we have also embarked on the formation of a "Good Laboratory Practices" or GLP Committee, under the guidance of Hank Wolfe. This committee should be of special interest to our members from the industrial sector who are required to operate under GLP conditions and should also be informative for academic labs as well. Both of these new committees are the product of your suggestions at last year's business meeting. Finally, by the time you read this, you should have received the long promised compilation on the "Identification of Modified PTH-Amino Acids in Protein Sequence Analysis". This item is intended to be an ongoing effort and we hope that you will continue to submit material for it.
Next year promises to be even busier. We have already made commitments to organize workshops for the ASBMB meeting, the American Society of Mass Spectrometry meeting and the Methods in Protein Structure Analysis meeting. In addition, the expanded format for our annual meeting will be retained and we continue to explore the possibility of an independent ABRF meeting in the near future. This next year will also include the preparation and submission, under the guidance of John Crabb, of new applications for funding the research efforts of ABRF.
We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Sheenah Mische upon her election to the Executive Board. Also, a hearty thank you and farewell to Ray Paxton who will be leaving the Board at the end of this year upon the expiration of his term. Ray has done a great job as our Secretary/Treasurer for the last two years and he will certainly be missed.
Gregory A. Grant
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