Created: 1st December 1999, last updated: 21st February 2000, © 1999 ABRF
Executive Board Meeting
The ABRF Executive Board (EB) met on October 16 and 17, 1999, in San Francisco. Karen De Jongh, our treasurer, led off with the fiscal report for the year. Our society is financially sound and on its way to achieving its goal of 2 years worth of operating costs in assets. This goal should be achieved in 2 to 3 years. The ABRF '99 Annual Meeting was also a financial success. The society's assets are being monitored by our Finance Committee, and in this time of loss in the stock market, our conservative investments have remained small but positive.
The EB also had its first opportunity to meet with Jennifer Watson of Professional Association Management (PAM), the new association manager for ABRF. Jennifer has the membership list under control, is working with Karen on the financial aspects of the society, is starting to make a list of duties and responsibilities for each office, and is starting to create a "memory file" regarding how procedures are accomplished, especially with regard to presidential duties. She will also be responsible for updating the ABRF Web Site.
Publications Committee and the Journal of Biomolecular Techniques
A new Publications Committee has been formed and is already active. The members are John Rush and Ben Dunn, and the chair is Ralph Bradshaw. The number one priority of the committee is to insure the success of JBT. Their second priority is to assist with other society publications. The committee has plans for organization of the journal, having the journal included in abstracting services, increasing visibility of the journal, and increasing advertising sales in the journal. Ad hoc members include Clayton Naeve, Editor-in-Chief of JBT, Clive Slaughter, Executive Editor of JBT, and Lynda Bonewald, ABRF President. Ken Mitchelhill has been forced to resign as Associate Editor as he is leaving the biomedical community for computer networking. He will be sorely missed. Now, more than ever, the official journal of your society needs your support--submit your best articles to JBT!
Web Site
In addition to resigning from the editorial board of JBT, Ken Mitchelhill will no longer be able to function as the Web Master for the ABRF Web Site and discussion groups. Jennifer Watson will update the Web Site as far as membership, announcements, and routine management are concerned. In the meantime, the Web Site content needs to be updated. A committee will be formed to define the functionality of the Web Site. Quotes for specific services and for the institution of a password for members to access the electronic discussion group will be solicited from professionals, and these changes will be instituted.
It was also suggested that, in addition to defining the functionality of the Web Site, this committee should set up or define a data set for use by the ABRF community at large, especially with respect to courses offered before the Annual Meeting. Whereas, PAM is needed to take care of the logistics for courses, this committee would make arrangements for the courses so that the instructor could focus on teaching. It was recommended that the present mass spectrometry research group be transformed into the ABRF Courses Committee. There were two reasons for this decision: first, this committee is already involved in setting up courses, and second, mass spectrometry should be or has been incorporated into the majority of the other research groups. John Stults is recruiting members and establishing responsibilities for this new committee.
Research Groups
The Solution Interactions Research Group has been officially approved by the EB. The Fragment Analysis and Gene Array Research Groups are still in their formative phases. The EB will be making recommendations in the future for consolidation of research groups. A time has not yet been decided for the annual EB Research Group Chairs meeting, but it should take place just before ABRF2000. It was also decided that each committee and research group may use one mailing per year or request one set of mailing labels per year from PAM. PAM will not be able to handle sample distribution. If more than one mailing is necessary, a request can be made to the EB through the group's EB liaison.
ABRF2000 Award
The new recipient of the ABRF2000 Award is Leroy Hood, who will be recognized at our annual meeting for his contributions to the development of instrumentation and methodology in the biological sciences. He and his laboratory have contributed enormously to the technologies used by members of ABRF. Plans for ABRF2000 are proceeding well. Ruedi Aebersold and Ulf Landegren have put together an exciting agenda. Be sure and register for the pre-meeting courses early! The annual meeting is a time for members to meet face to face. Be sure and use this opportunity for your committee or research group. At the EB meeting following ABRF2000, the EB will choose new officers, a president-elect, and a treasurer-elect for 2001. The two new members of the EB will also be officially announced at ABRF2000.
ABRF2001
Our new organizers for ABRF2001 will be Paul Tempst and Dave Schwartz. This meeting will be held February 24 through 27, 2001, at the Town & Country Hotel in San Diego, California. ABRF2002 will be held in Austin, Texas, from March 9 through 14, 2002, ABRF2003 will be held in Denver, Colorado, during the week of February 19 through 26, 2003, and ABRF2004 will be held in Portland, Oregon, during the week of February 19 through 25, 2004. Mark your calendars!
ABRF will sponsor a session at the 39th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology to be held in Washington, DC, on December 11 through 15, 1999. Paul Tempst of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center has organized the session entitled "Targeted Proteomics in Cell and Molecular Biology."
Completion of the genome project will lead to an even bigger challenge: interpreting the fluxes and flows of material and signals that result in cell behavior. Protein science should play a major role in this endeavor, simply because proteins carry out most of the work in a cell. A new term, proteomics, has been introduced to describe what many expect will be the future of protein structural chemistry. In the present vernacular, the term seems synonymous with attempts to map all proteins in every cell using two-dimensional gels and high-throughput mass spectrometry. But even on a smaller scale, our knowledge of protein-protein, protein-DNA and protein--small molecule interactions is still far from complete. Thus, an immediate task is to find out which proteins bind to what other molecules in the cell and to examine how the composition of such complexes might shift in response to cellular signals, natural ligands, and drugs. This field has been termed targeted proteomics.
Speakers will describe approaches to purify or specifically capture protein complexes on a micro-scale and how to identify the components by mass spectrometric analysis of fragments. Several experts will then discuss how these discoveries have advanced our understanding of biological systems in their respective fields of interest.
Topics and speakers include:
Raffi Aroian, University of California San Diego, "Actin-Binding Proteins in the Development of C. elegans"
Bradley Cairns, University of Utah, "Chromatin Remodeling Machines in Transcriptional Regulation"
Sankar Ghosh, Yale University, "A Decade Long Story of NF-kappaB"
Thomas Söllner, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, "SNAREs in Vesicle Targeting and Fusion"
Paul Tempst, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, "Practical Aspects of Protein Mass Spectrometry"
The recent association of ABRF with FASEB has provided our young society with significant science policy exposure among the member societies representing the entire biomedical research community. By natural orientation, ABRF brings a knowledge of technological needs and opportunities to these deliberations that other member societies have not been sufficiently sensitive to in the past. For more than 2 years, one of the most important opportunities has involved our active participation in influencing national funding priorities by articulating critical needs for sustained investment in new instrumentation and the development of innovative technologies to underpin our research enterprise. These recommendations are published in the Federal Funding for Biomedical and Related Life Sciences Research, FY 2000, and Molecular Medicine 2020 (http://www.faseb/org).
It is of continuing importance for society members to realize the progress made thus far and to actively support our efforts by direct communication on these matters with members of Congress.
A. L. Burlingame
NOTE: FASEB has granted permission to reproduce the following portion of the FASEB Consensus Conference FY 2000 in JBT.
Institutional Research Funding
Congress has been generous in its funding allocations for NIH during the last two years. When financial resources were tighter, however, NIH reduced support for some activities in order to preserve its core mission. One of the areas in which funding was eliminated was institutional support grants for research. The need for institutional support, however, still has grown.
Three classes of need exist at the local level. The first need is to purchase equipment whose costs are above the level funded on R01 grants and too low to justify a separate institutional grant. The second need is to provide bridge funding for investigators whose renewal applications do not receive funding, but are judged likely to be successful in recompetition. Bridge funding allows investigators to maintain their research groups and continue the forward momentum of their projects without incurring the expense of closing down and restarting labs. The third group of expenses is for the initiation of new projects and for new investigators. These funds provide local flexibility in promoting new research.
We propose that these funds be distributed only after rigorous peer review at the institutional level. Local decision-making will provide rapid access to necessary equipment and timely access to funds in order to maintain research groups.
New Technologies for Research
Advanced Technology, Instrumentation, and National Research Resources
Progress in research depends on new tools and methodologies to reveal higher levels of insight into challenging or previously intractable research problems. Access to the technologies and sophisticated instrumentation is needed to achieve quantum increases in understanding. Many of these advanced technologies require expertise or resources beyond the reach of any single investigator and thus must be made available to the biomedical research community through the well-established strategy of shared resources.
The National Center for Research Resources/Biomedical Technology program provides three mechanisms for support in this arena: R01, P41, and S10. Each program plays a unique role in the development and acquisition of technology. R01s are needed to conceptualize and innovate; P41s are necessary to develop cutting-edge, expensive, and scarce technology, make it work, and make it available to the research community. The S10 program permits groups of researchers to share in expensive, commercially available, off-the-shelf instruments.
Shared Technology Resource Centers (P41)
The 64 shared technology resource centers around the country are vital for taking advantage of the emerging knowledge of the human genome, which helps to elucidate the composition and function of the human cell machinery. The critical need for sophisticated technology resources is demonstrated by the growing number of investigators who require the use of such technologies in order to perform their research. In 1998, close to 6,000 federally supported investigators needed the technologies being developed in these centers.
A unique advantage of shared resource facilities is their integration of chemistry, physics, engineering, and biology to solve intricate biomedical problems. The cross-disciplinary capabilities of an integrated network of facilities are necessary for determining quickly and correctly the molecular defects underlying human diseases. These efforts will require the concomitant development of tools in bioinformatics to assure the necessary linkages to databases and the international biomedical enterprise. The existing and proposed facilities should be linked via an integrated network to protein production facilities, 2-D gel electrophoresis laboratories, protein purification/identification facilities, and animal modeling centers. This is necessary in order to optimize the quality of materials initially analyzed, to decide quickly on the next molecular target, and to converge on that target by using the network of advanced shared instrumentation facilities. Such facilities should receive long-term funding to assure that skilled technicians, serviced equipment, and broadly trained professionals will be available to solve simultaneously multiple scientific problems posed by disparately trained biomedical scientists.
The $67 million spent annually by the federal government to run these centers has not relieved concerns regarding the chronic underfunding of these resources. They are critical to maintaining the forefront in existing key research technologies that R01 investigators have come to rely on. Additional resources would increase opportunities for investigators to use shared technological resources including the development of "collaboratories" or "laboratories without walls," which would enable the remote access of the resource centers via the Internet or by encouraging natural interconnectivity of research resources with clusters of P01s focused on particular large-scale problems.
Shared Instrumentation (S10)
FASEB acknowledges the importance of the significant increase in FY 1999 funding for shared instrumentation. This increase restored funding for the S10 program to its FY 1991 level. However, the accumulated effects of the broad degradation in the quality and availability of critical state-of-the-art research tools will require funding increases of a greater magnitude. It is urgent to upgrade obsolete, shared instrumentation and to fund new types of shared instrumentation in both the S10 and P41 programs in order to accelerate research on molecular details of devastating human diseases.*
Initiative in Integrated Technologies and Cell Biology of Human Cell Types
A new NIH inter-institute program in innovative technologies is needed to develop breakthroughs for elucidating the biological function of proteins as well as the next generation DNA sequencing technologies. A host of novel strategies will be necessary for illuminating the function of individual proteins, or coordinately expressed suites of processed proteins, that comprise the multitude of functional protein machines that self-assemble and work with each other in maintaining cell homeostasis.
Many of these proteins will be molecular targets for novel pharmaceuticals and diagnostic tests. It is currently impossible, however, to attribute biological function to the tens of thousands of proteins that are encoded by the human genome utilizing existing methods. Hence, work must begin immediately to develop novel experimental and computational methods that can attribute or discover biological function for the growing list of proteins whose function cannot be deduced from structural similarity to proteins of defined function. Biomedical research conducted after the completion of the Human Genome Project will be severely undermined unless the biological function of new proteins can be determined quickly.
In parallel, further de novo sequencing of additional genomes, comparative sequencing of related genomes, and sequencing to assess variation within genomes must be continued. Placed in the public domain, this information will become an increasingly indispensable global tool for advancing biological and medical research.
In addition to greater support for access to state-of-the-art technological resources, more funds must be invested in the creation of the next generation of advanced technology for biomedical research. Accelerating this process may require new mechanisms beyond those currently available in traditional grant programs.