Mendel Lectures

The Mendel Lectures is a series of lectures[1][2][3][4] given by the world´s top scientists in genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, microbiology, medicine and related areas which has been held in the refectory of the Augustian Abbey of St. Thomas in Brno, Czech Republic since May 2003. The lectures were established to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) by James Watson (1928) and Francis Crick (1916-2004). The Mendel Lectures are named in honour of Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-1884), the founder of genetics, who lived and worked in the Augustinian Abbey in Brno 1843-1884. Based on his experiments conducted in the abbey between 1856 and 1863, Mendel established the basic rules of heredity, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance. The Mendel Lectures are organized by the Masaryk University, the Mendel Museum, the St. Anne´s University Hospital Brno, and the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria. The thirteenth season of the Mendel Lectures is running at present. More than 90 top scientists, including many Nobel Prize winners, have visited Brno to give a Mendel Lecture, for example Tim Hunt, Jack W. Szostak, John Gurdon, Elizabeth Blackburn, Paul Nurse, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Günter Blobel, Kurt Wüthrich, Jules A. Hoffmann, Aaron Ciechanover and others.

History

The first idea of the Mendel Lectures occurred during the international conference ´EMBO Workshop: Genetics after the Genome´ organised by Dieter Schweizer and Kim Nasmyth in 2002. Anna and Kim Nasmyth from Oxford, Imma Mautner Markhof from Austria, Jan Motlík from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and Jiřina Relichová from the Masaryk University prepared and organized the very first series of Mendel Lectures. They named the series „The Road to the DNA“ and focused the lectures on the historical context of genetics. The two first speakers, Sir Walter Bodmer from Oxford and Charles Weissmann from London, gave their talks in the Augustinian Abbey in Old Brno on May 13, 2003. Subsequent series have addressed more topical scientific findings. Since 2003, more than 90 top scientists, including many Nobel Prize winners, have visited Brno to give a Mendel Lecture.

The Mendel Lectures are also connected with the establishment of the Mendel Museum and revitalization of scientific activities in the Augustinian Abbey in Old Brno in 2003 in the event of the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The British Council donated a copy of the original photograph of James Watson and Francis Crick and a copy of their model of DNA from 1953 is on loan from Gustav Ammerer to the Mendel Museum.

Initially, the Mendel Lectures were financially supported by the geneticist Gustav Ammerer from Vienna through his charity Vereinigung zur Förderung der Genomforschung, by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and by the British Council. Realization of the Mendel Lectures have been also supported by the Masaryk University, Authority of the South Moravian Region, the City of Brno, and the IMP Vienna. Between 2012 and 2014 the lectures were funded by the grant of the Czech Ministry of Education and the European Union (project Pluricell). Since 2015, the Mendel Lectures are supported by the International Clinical Research Center of St. Anne´s University Hospital Brno and its project ICRC-ERA-HumanBridge funded by the European Union.

Present

The Mendel Lectures are now mainly focused on combining cutting-edge interdisciplinary approaches, technologies and methods of biochemistry, biophysics, molecular biology, computational modelling, imaging, microbiology, cell biology, physiology, genetics, toxicology, developmental biology, evolutionary biology and medicine.

The program of the Mendel Lectures is prepared by a scientific committee composed of Aaron Ciechanover, Simon Boulton, Kim Nasmyth, Lumír Krejčí and Vít Bryja. The Mendel Lectures are now organized by Lumír Krejčí, Martina Vráblíková, Kateřina Krejčí and Gabriela Pavlíková from the Masaryk University, Ondřej Dostál, Michaela Jarkovská and Lucie Vychodilová from the Mendel Museum, Alena Malachová from the St. Anne´s University Hospital Brno, and Manuela Steurer from the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria. The current series of lectures is funded by the International Clinical Research Center of St. Anne´s University Hospital Brno - project ICRC-ERA-HumanBridge.

List of speakers

Series Nr. Date Speaker Institution Lecture title Notes
1 1 May 13, 2003 Sir Walter Bodmer Institute of Molecular Medicine, Oxford, UK "The human genome: Past, present & future"
1 2 May 13, 2003 Charles Weissmann Institute of Neurology, London, UK "The role of DNA in prion diseases"
1 3 June 5, 2003 Horace Judson George Washington University, USA "Before the structure: The roots of the evolution in biology"
1 4 September 29, 2003 Sir Tim Hunt Cancer Research UK, Clare Hall Laboratories, UK "Cells and their division" [5]
1 5 October 16, 2003 Sir David Hopwood John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK "Fifty years of Streptomyces genetics: Implications for antibiotic discovery"
1 6 October 30, 2003 Anne McLaren The Wellcome Trust / Cancer Research UK, Cambridge, UK "Mendel and Michurin today"
1 7 November 11, 2003 Emil Paleček Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Brno "DNA double helix in Czechoslovakia. Electrochemical DNA sensors"
1 8 November 11, 2003 Georgii Georgiev Institute of Gene Biology, Moscow, Russia "Some achievements of Russian molecuar genetics between double helix and human genome"
1 9 December 9, 2003 François Gros Académie des Sciences, Paris, France "From the double helix to genomics and beyond"
2 10 October 7, 2004 Edward Trifonov University of Haifa, Israel "The nature and organisation of genomes, their sequence structure and evolution"
2 11 October 21, 2004 Jack W. Szostak Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Boston, USA "The origin of life and the emergence of Darwinian evolution" [6]
2 12 November 18, 2004 Barry Dickson Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna, Austria "Wired for sex: How reproductive behaviours are programmed into a fly’s brain"
2 13 March 17, 2005 Ernst Hafen University of Zurich, Switzerland "Genetic dissection of insulin signalling and growth in drosophila"
2 14 April 20, 2005 Marc-André Sirard Université Laval, Quebec, Canada "Gene expression in bovine oocytes and embryos: Prospect and challenges"
2 15 May 5, 2005 Sir Alec Jeffreys University of Leicester, UK "Genetic fingerprinting and beyond"
3 16 October 3, 2005 Steven McKnight University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, USA "Schizophrenia, stem cells and sprouty signaling"
3 17 November 10, 2005 Kim Nasmyth Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna, Austria "Molecules behind Mendel’s laws of heredity: How cohesin holds sister DNAs together during mitosis and meiosis"
3 18 March 30, 2006 Richard Henderson MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK
3 19 April 6, 2006 Jiri Bartek Danish Cancer Society, Copenhagen, Denmark "DNA damage response: Molecular mechanisms and relevance for cancer"
3 20 April 20, 2006 Václav Pačes Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague "On the origin of life on Earth"
3 21 May 4, 2006 Susan Lindquist MIT, Cambridge, USA / Whitehead Institute / HHMI "Prion proteins and new paradigm epigenetics"
3 22 May 18, 2006 Adrian Bird Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, University of Edinburgh, UK "Proteins that read DNA methylaton signal"
4 23 October 12, 2006 John Gurdon Wellcome/CRC Institute, University of Cambridge, UK "Nuclear reprogramming as a route to cell replacement" [7]
4 24 October 26, 2006 Ronald Plasterk Netherlands Institute for Developmental Biology, Utrecht "miRNAs for animal development"
4 25 October 31, 2006 Elizabeth Blackburn University of California, San Francisco, USA "Responses of cells and organisms to altered telomere maintenance" [8]
4 26 November 9, 2006 Rodney Rothstein Columbia University, New York, USA "Choreography of the DNA damage response in budding yeast"
4 27 April 19, 2007 Wilhelm Ansorge ETH Zurich, Switzerland "Genomes, proteomes and single cell analysis"
4 28 April 26, 2007 Richard Losick Harvard University, Boston, USA "Surprises in how microbes cope with uncertainty"
4 29 May 10, 2007 Jan Ellenberg EMBO, Heidelberg, Germany "Imaging how living cells divide: From single proteins to genome wide screening"
5 30 October 2, 2007 Titia de Lange Rockefeller University, New York, USA "How telomeres deal with the DNA damage response"
5 31 November 8, 2007 Walter Jakob Gehring University of Basel, Switzerland "The master control gene of eye development and the evolution of light reception"
5 32 November 29, 2007 Svante Pääbo Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany "Of humans, neanderthals and apes"
5 33 March 6, 2008 Elliot Meyerowitz California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA "Plant stem cells: Live imaging and computational models of the Arabidopsis shoot apical meristem"
5 34 April 10, 2008 Stephen Craig West Cancer Research UK, Clare Hall Laboratories, UK "DNA strand-break repair and relationship to human disease"
5 35 April 17, 2008 Richard M. Durbin Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK "Sequencing hundreds of human genomes"
5 36 May 5, 2008 Sir Paul Nurse Rockefeller University, New York, USA "The great ideas of biology" [9]
6 37 October 9, 2008 Jan-Michael Peters Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna, Austria "How cohesin controls sister chromatid cohesion and transcription"
6 38 November 20, 2008 Andrea Musacchio FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology Foundation / European Institute of Oncology, Milan, Italy "Molecular bases of chromosome segregation"
6 39 March 29, 2009 Jonas Frisén Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden "New neurons in old brains"
6 40 May 7, 2009 Sir Venkatraman Ramakrishnan MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK "What structures of the ribosome have revealed about its central role in translating genetic information" [10]
6 41 May 14, 2009 Frances Ashcroft University of Oxford, UK "Neonatal diabetes: From ion channel to disease"
6 42 May 21, 2009 Walter Keller University of Basel, Switzerland "3´end processing of messenger RNA precursors and RNA quality control"
7 43 October 15, 2009 Meinrad Busslinger Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna, Austria "Lineage commitment and developmental plasticity of lymphocytes"
7 44 October 22, 2009 Jason Chin The Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK "New genetic codes"
7 45 November 23, 2009 Jim E. Haber Brandeis University, Waltham, USA "Multiple mechanisms to repair a broken chromosome"
7 46 April 29, 2010 Azim Surani Gurdon Institute, Cambridge, UK "Germ cell specification in mice"
7 47 May 13, 2010 Kai Simons Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany "Cell membrane organisation and lipid rafts"
7 48 May 27, 2010 Ueli Schibler University of Geneva, Switzerland "Circadian gene expression in mammals: How does the brain talk to the body?"
8 49 October 21, 2010 Michael N. Hall University of Basel, Switzerland "TOR signaling in growth and metabolism"
8 50 November 4, 2010 Iain Campbell University of Oxford, UK "Cell migration and protein-protein interactions"
8 51 April 7, 2011 Linda Partridge University College London, UK "The new biology of ageing"
8 52 April 14, 2011 David John Sherratt University of Oxford, UK "A passion for DNA"
8 53 May 5, 2011 Steven Henikoff Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, USA "Histone variant dynamics and epigenetics"
8 54 May 12, 2011 Hans Clevers Netherlands Institute of Developmental Biology, Utrecht, Netherlands "Wnt signaling, Lgr5 stem cells and cancer"
8 55 May 26, 2011 Jeffery Errington Newcastle University, UK "L-form bacteria and the origins of life"
9 56 October 6, 2011 John Diffley Cancer Research UK, London, UK "How Mendel's genes are copied"
9 57 October 13, 2011 Timothy John Mitchison Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA "How does a large cell find its center?"
9 58 November 10, 2011 Jürgen Knoblich Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA), Vienna, Austria "Proliferation control and tumorigenesis in stem cell lineages of the nervous system: Lessons from Drosophila and mouse genetics"
9 59 March 8, 2012 Angelika Amon MIT, Cambridge, USA "Causes and consequences of aneuploidy"
9 60 March 22, 2012 Anthony A. Hyman Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany "Cytoplasmic organization through phase transitions"
9 61 April 19, 2012 Roland Kanaar Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, Netherlands "How DNA recombination maintains genome integrity"
9 62 May 10, 2012 Óscar Fernández-Capetillo Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), Madrid, Spain "Exploring the role of replicative stress in cancer and ageing"
9 63 May 24, 2012 Douglas E. Koshland University of California, Berkeley, USA "Preventing chromosomes from going rogue"
10 64 October 8, 2012 Gary Ruvkun Simches Research Center, Boston, USA "An animal surveillance pathway for microbial inhibition of conserved cellular components and induction of defense responses"
10 65 October 8, 2012 Josef Jiricny University of Zurich, Switzerland "FAN 1, a novel enzyme involved in the processing of cisplatin adducts in DNA"
10 66 October 8, 2012 Jan Hoeijmakers Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, Netherlands "DNA, the key molecule in cancer and ageing"
10 67 October 8, 2012 Jiri Lukas Danish Cancer Society, Copenhagen, Denmark "Spatial and temporal organization of genome maintenance"
10 68 October 9, 2012 Günter Blobel Rockefeller University, New York, USA "Molecular design of nature´s largest and most versatile channel anchored in the center of the nuclear pore" [11]
10 69 October 9, 2012 Julius Lukes Biology Centre, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Ceske Budejovice "RNA editing in trypanosomatid protists"
10 70 October 9, 2012 Jiri Friml Flanders Institute for Biotechnology, Ghent, Belgium "How cells make a plant: Role for directional auxin transport"
10 71 October 25, 2012 Nancy Kleckner Harvard University, Cambridge, USA "Meiotic recombination: The exception to, and the executor of, Mendel's laws"
10 72 March 14, 2013 Brenda S. Schulman St. Jude Children´s Research Hospital, Memphis, USA "Twists and turns in ubiquitin conjugation cascades"
10 73 April 11, 2013 Tom Rapoport Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA "How the ER gets into shape"
10 74 April 18, 2013 Torben Heick Jensen Aarhus University, Denmark "Making and breaking RNA in human nuclei" [12]
10 75 May 2, 2013 Simon Boulton Cancer Research UK, South Mimms, UK "Genome stability and the control of recombination"
10 76 May 9, 2013 Peter Walter HHMI / University of California, San Francisco, USA "The unfolded protein response in health and disease"
10 77 May 16, 2013 Stanislas Leibler Rockefeller University, New York, USA "Following in Mendel's footsteps: Statistical analysis of microbial behavioral phenotypes"
11 78 October 17, 2013 Peter Baumann Stowers Institute for Medical Research, Kansas City, USA "Biogenesis and regulation of telomerase"
11 79 October 24, 2013 Carlos Bustamante University of California, Berkeley, USA "Grabbing the cat by the tail: How a viral molecular motor packages DNA"
11 80 November 21, 2013 Kay Hofmann University of Cologne, Germany "A common evolutionary basis for cell death pathways in animals, plants and fungi"
11 81 April 3, 2014 Olivier Voinnet ETH Zurich, Switzerland "Defensive RNA silencing in plants and animals"
11 82 May 22, 2014 Joan Massagué Solé Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, USA "Origins of metastatic traits"
12 83 October 30, 2014 Lorraine S. Symington Columbia University Medical Center, New York, USA "Mechanisms of homologous recombination"
12 84 March 5, 2015 Herbert Waldmann Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology, Dortmund, Germany "Biology oriented synthesis"
12 85 March 19, 2015 Kurt Wüthrich ETH Zurich, Switzerland "The colorful postgenomic world of proteins" [13]
12 86 April 2, 2015 Xiaoliang Sunney Xie Harvard University, Cambridge, USA "Life at the single molecule level: Single cell genomics"
12 87 April 9, 2015 Michael Rosbash Brandeis University, Waltham, USA "Biological time travels: Old and new circadian rhythm tales"
12 88 May 21, 2015 Jules A. Hoffmann University of Strasbourg, France "Innate immunity: From flies to humans" [14]
12 89 May 28, 2015 Maria Jasin Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, USA "Protecting the genome by homologous recombination"
13 90 October 1, 2015 Masaru Okabe Osaka University, Japan "The first “Green mice” and the mechanism of mammalian fertilization revised by gene-manipulated animals"
13 91 October 22, 2015 Aaron Ciechanover Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel "The ubiquitin proteolytic system: From basic mechanisms thru human diseases and on to drug targeting" [15]
13 92 November 12, 2015 Michael G. Rosenfeld HHMI / University of California, San Diego, USA / University of Rochester, USA "Mendel's messengers: Enhancers and transcriptional programs"
13 93 March 3, 2016 Michael G. Rossmann Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA "A personal history of structural virology"
13 94 April 7, 2016 Steve Jackson Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, UK "Harnessing genetic principals to treat human disease"
13 95 April 21, 2016 Jennifer Doudna HHMI / University of California, Berkeley, USA "CRISPR-Cas genome surveillance: From biology to breakthrough technology"
13 96 May 5, 2016 Joan A. Steitz HHMI / Yale University, New Haven, USA "Viral and cellular noncoding RNAs: Insight into evolution"
13 97 May 19, 2016 Stephen J. Benkovic Pennsylvania State University, USA "On de novo purine biosynthesis: The purinosome"

References

  1. ↑ "Mendel Lectures - Home". mendellecturesold.muni.cz. Retrieved 2016-02-05.
  2. ↑ University, Masaryk. "Calendar of events 2016 - Masaryk University". www.muni.cz. Retrieved 2016-02-05.
  3. ↑ "Mendelovo muzeum - Lectures". mendelmuseum.muni.cz. Retrieved 2016-02-05.
  4. ↑ Malachová, A. "MENDEL LECTURES AND JOHANN GREGOR MENDEL - A CONSTANT CHALLENGE". library.iated.org. Retrieved 2016-02-06.
  5. ↑ "Tim Hunt - Facts". www.nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2016-02-05.
  6. ↑ "Jack W. Szostak - Facts". www.nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2016-02-05.
  7. ↑ "Sir John B. Gurdon - Facts". www.nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2016-02-05.
  8. ↑ "Elizabeth H. Blackburn - Facts". www.nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2016-02-05.
  9. ↑ "Sir Paul Nurse - Facts". www.nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2016-02-05.
  10. ↑ "Venkatraman Ramakrishnan - Facts". www.nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2016-02-05.
  11. ↑ "Günter Blobel - Facts". www.nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2016-02-05.
  12. ↑ 6282@au.dk. "Torben Heick Jensen speaker at highly esteemed lecture series". mbg.au.dk. Retrieved 2016-02-06.
  13. ↑ "Kurt Wüthrich - Facts". www.nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2016-02-05.
  14. ↑ "Jules A. Hoffmann - Facts". www.nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2016-02-05.
  15. ↑ "Aaron Ciechanover - Facts". www.nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2016-02-05.

External links

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