The seventh annual running of the MMI course ‘Techniques & Strategies in Molecular Medicine’ took place in the UCD Conway Institute on 8-9 December 2009. The 114 attendees from MMI partner institutions heard lectures from a total of 17 speakers from UCD, RSCI, TCD and NUI Galway over the two days. In addition to MMI partner institutions, attendees travelled from DCU, QUB, DIT, NUIM and UL. 

The course is designed to give bioscientists and clinicians a broad overview of research techniques and their application and to give graduate students a basic knowledge of technologies outside their own project or lab that may be of current or future use. 

	Dr Leonie Young (RCSI) during her talk on Immunodetection methods on cell and tissue extracts

The first day of the course covered techniques for analysis and manipulation of genes including RNA detection and quantitation, gene expression, RNA interference, polymorphism, transgenics and knockouts, and cloning strategies. A lecture on model organisms was also presented and a lecture on protein-protein interactions, the first of a series of protein techniques lectures.

A talk on Protein expression and purification was given by Dr Henry Windle (TCD)

The protein theme was continued on the second morning with lectures on protein expression, protein-protein interactions, biomedical applications of expression proteomics and an introduction to the technique of mass spectrometry. Cells & Tissues lectures featured flow cytometry, immunodetection methods, laser capture microdissection, stem cells, and high content screening and analysis platform technologies. A lecture on Imaging using Fluorescent/Confocal Microscopy was also added to the programme for the first time this year. 

	At the wine reception: Dr Mark Watson (MMI), Prof Pierre De Meyts (Hagedorn Research Institute), Prof Boris Kholodenko (Systems Biology Ireland), Prof Walter Kolch (Systems Biology Ireland)

The course finished with a keynote lecture from Professor Pierre de Meyts, Hagedorn Research Institute, Denmark. Professor de Meyts gave the audience an account of his cutting-edge research with a lecture entitled ’Structure-based systems biology of insulin and IGF-I receptors signalling’. The keynote lecture and the wine reception which followed were sponsored by novo nordisk. The course also benefited from sponsorship from Applied Biosystems.

The course programme and lecture abstracts, and the list of course contributors are available here.