The MMI course “Techniques & Strategies in Molecular Medicine” ran over four days in the Hamilton Building, Trinity College Dublin, on 11,12 & 15,16 December 2008. This was the sixth annual running of the course. There were a record number of applicants to the course and 95 people attended one or more sessions. Attendees heard lectures from a total of 17 speakers over the four morning sessions, with lecturers coming from UCD, RSCI, TCD and NUI Galway.
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/lab that may be of current or future use. The cross-institutional audience ranges from first year postgraduates to postdocs and principal investigators.
As in previous years, the topics covered could be broadly categorised into three main themes: Analysing and Manipulating Genes; Proteins; and Cells &Tissues.
The first theme included lectures on RNA detection and quantitation, gene expression, RNA interference, polymorphism, transgenics and knockouts, and cloning strategies. The series of lectures on proteins comprised protein expression, protein-protein interactions, biomedical applications of expression proteomics and an introduction to the technique of mass spectrometry.
The Cells & Tissues lectures featured flow cytometry, immunodetection methods, laser capture microdissection and high Content analysis of nanoparticle/cell interactions. A new speaker on the course this year was Dr Linda Howard, a senior investigator with REMEDI and NUI Galway, who gave a lecture on “Stem Cells – Biology and Applications”.
The final lecture of the course covered another new and highly topical area: Professor Jochen Prehn, RCSI gave an account of “Medical Systems Biology – the case of the cancer cell not able to die”. In his presentation Professor Prehn outlined approaches to develop computational models of biological process that help explain how key biological processes such as apoptosis are switched ‘on’ or ‘off’, by looking at multiple rather than individual genes or proteins.
Feedback was very positive with many attendees describing the course as very “enjoyable” and “informative” and the vast majority reported that the material covered will be useful to them.
The course programme and lecture abstracts, and the list of course contributors are available at http://www.molecularmedicineireland.ie/TechStratMolMed2008.html