Session List

Chair(s): Sandra Gabelli, Callie Saeher

Please note that pre-registration is required and the max capacity for this event is 20 attendees.

#IAmRemarkable is an initiative empowering women and other underrepresented groups to celebrate their achievements in the workplace and beyond. Its goal is to improve the self promotion motivation and skills and challenge the social perception around self promotion. Many of us struggle to talk about and celebrate our accomplishments often due to cultural and gender norms. Through our facilitator sessions, #IAmRemarkable helps thousands of people learn the importance of self-promotion in their personal and professional life.

Chair(s): Tim Stachowski, Marcus Fischer

SIG Sponsor(s): Biological Macromolecules

Co-Sponsor(s): General Interest

Proteins are notorious shapeshifters that change conformations in response to environmental cues like temperature, pH, and ligand binding. This flexibility often underpins biological processes like enzyme catalysis and signal transduction. Recent advances in technologies and modeling algorithms move beyond understanding protein structures as static images and closer to generating molecular movies of proteins throughout their active lifecycles. In turn, these experiments can reveal new opportunities to modulate protein function for therapeutics and biology. This session will focus on emerging methods for exploring protein flexibility, examples where flexibility reveals functional insights, and applications in modulating proteins and drug design.

Chair(s): Michal Hammel, Sarah Keane

SIG Sponsor(s): Small Angle Scattering

Co-Sponsor(s): BioMac

This session will highlight the utility of small-angle scattering and in combination with other structural techniques for determining nucleic acid structures and their protein complexes. The session will also highlight success stories where small-angle scattering was used to validate predicted RNA, RNA-protein, or DNA-protein structures. Studies may also include X-ray crystallography, XFEL, CryoEM, or hybrid methods, including those incorporating predictive/computational modeling.

Chair(s): Joseph Ferrara, Christos Malliakas, Ana Pakzad

SIG Sponsor(s): MicroED

Co-Sponsor(s): Small Molecule

MicroED is becoming a mainstream technique for solving structures intractable to conventional X-ray diffraction techniques. Examples of materials that yielded to MicroED include MOFs, natural products and many other materials only available as a powder. In this half-day session, we will explore current trends in micro-electron diffractions and best practices for data collection, processing and refinement.

Chair(s): Art Lyubimov, Daniel Paley

SIG Sponsor(s): Light Sources

Co-Sponsor(s): Best Practices in Data Analysis

Serial crystallography has emerged as a powerful method for structure determination. At X-ray free electron lasers, "diffraction before destruction" is now a standard technique for studying macromolecules, with unique applications in time-resolved experiments ranging from seconds to femtoseconds. Synchrotron and electron radiation offer new opportunities for growing the availability and scope of serial data collection. The field is also finding applications outside of macromolecular structures, with growing interest in serial diffraction for chemical/small-molecule crystallography. These diverse methods and applications are driving the development of new techniques for sample delivery, instrumentation, and data processing. Especially, the growing data rates in the field (currently in the kHz range at XFEL sources) present an opportunity for applying modern tools in AI and high-performance computing. This session highlights these new advances and the future prospects for serial crystallography as a modern and growing structural technique.

Chair(s): Dan Decato, Josh Chen

SIG Sponsor(s): Service

Co-Sponsor(s): Small Molecule, Young Scientist, BioMac

Peer review is an indispensable part of the scientific publishing world. However, it is often overlooked in STEM programs, leaving many researchers to tackle this crucial process with limited training. As a result, they may lack formal education on how to effectively conduct a review, which can ultimately lead to their assignment as the dreaded "reviewer 2." This session aims to address various aspects of peer review, including how to handle requests, deciding whether to accept or reject manuscripts, providing constructive criticism, understanding the role of editors, distinguishing major and minor considerations, maintaining rational reviews, and effectively dealing with feedback.

Chair(s): Jue Liu, Luca Izzolino, Raul Castanda

SIG Sponsor(s): Materials/Neutrons/Powder

Co-Sponsor(s): Small Molecule

This session aims to showcase work involving computational and experimental methods alternative to traditional single-crystal X-ray diffraction for predicting and solving crystal structures of organic small molecules and functional inorganic compounds, with the goal of demonstrating their impact on real-life projects. Examples include but are not limited to, three-dimensional electron diffraction, small angle scattering, crystal structure prediction (CSP) methods, solid-state NMR techniques, structure solution from powder diffraction and total scattering data, and the combination of any of these techniques.

Chair(s): Matthew Brown, Scott Lee

SIG Sponsor(s): Service

Co-Sponsor(s): Powder, Small Molecule, Young Scientist, Canadian, BioMac

Is your structure too poor to publish? What compromises would you have to make to publish your "low quality" structure? Do you have some less then ideal powder data that you still think you can make something useful with? If you have ever asked yourself these questions, then share your problems, insights, structures, and advice with the crystallography community. This is a great opportunity for young crystallographers to share their work, where they can interact with a friendly audience, who with years of experience will provide constructive advice. Problems might include charge imbalance or other chemical issues, poor resolution or data completeness, complicated disorder, highly restrained models, unexplained residual electron density, suspicious of an incommensurate structure, etc. Talks in this session will be restricted to approximately 5 minutes in order to encourage audience participation and discussion. All talks will be selected from submitted abstracts. Those who submit abstracts to this session may still submit a second abstract to other sessions at no additional fee. This session is open to non-small molecule talks; Powder, protein and other types of crystallography are welcome!