About the Workshop
The ESCRTs (Endosomal Sorting Complexes Required for Transport) were discovered in 2002 and became one of the most dynamic fields of research in membrane cell biology. ESCRTs are protein complexes found in all cells and that participate in many essential functions within the cell: cytokinetic abscission, endosomal function, autophagy, viral budding and many others. ESCRT-III has unique features: it is the only membrane remodeling machine working on every organelle, performing membrane fission in a unique orientation, from within the neck that it breaks. While recent findings have proposed a mechanism of membrane remodeling, it remains to be tested and discussed. Also, ESCRTs are present in prokaryotes, in Archaea, and are therefore evolutionary conserved. What are their primitive functions, how did they acquire multiple functions through evolution are questions that remain to be explored.
The field of ESCRTs has gathered scientists from very different fields: structural biology, biochemistry, membrane biophysics, but also plant, archaeal, yeast and animal cell biology and evolutionary biology. The ESCRT meeting will provide a unique opportunity to bring together scientists from diverse fields, who would not normally coincide at conferences, to discuss the recent findings on ESCRT function, their evolutionary diversity and their mechanism of action.
Image credits: Margot Riggi, MPI-Biochemistry, Martinsried, DE
About EMBO Courses and Workshops
EMBO Courses and Workshops are selected for their excellent scientific quality and timelines, provision of good networking activities for all participants and speaker gender diversity (at least 40% of speakers must be from the underrepresented gender).
Organisers are encouraged to implement measures to make the meeting environmentally more sustainable.
