Ribosomes Structure and Mechanisms in Regulation of Protein Synthesis Part I.

This edition of Journal of Molecular Biology represents the first installment of a special edition on “ribosomes and protein synthesis” to coincide with the EMBORibosome Structure and Function Meeting that takes place from July 6-10th in Strasbourg, France, 2016. This meeting is part of a long series of ribosome meetings that have occurred triennially over the past 40 years, with previous meetings being held in Cape Cod, USA (2007), Orvieto, Italy (2010) and most recently in Napa Valley, California, USA (2013). This year, we are happy to announce that the ribosome meeting in Strasbourg will be conducted within the framework of an EMBO conference. As evident from the depth and breadth of the scientific program, the EMBO ribosome meeting in Strasbourg 2016 brings together world experts on many different aspects of the structure and function of the ribosome. This includes mechanistic insights into the core phases of translation initiation, elongation and termination but also regulatory aspects of translational control, including quality control. Such processes are dissected biochemically and structurally using a diverse array of cutting-edge technologies, ranging from single molecule fluorescence methodologies to state-of the art NMR, X-ray and cryo-EM techniques to genome-wide ribosome profiling analyses. It is amazing to think that only 3 years ago at the Ribosome meeting in Napa, the resolution limit for cryo-EM reconstructions of ribosomal particles was N4 Å. Since then the development in the direct electron detection technologies has enabled rapid improvements in the resolution obtained using Cryo-EM, which is also evident at this meeting with many oral presentations illustrating the power of this technique to resolve high-resolution structures of ribosomes from diverse species as well as in distinct functional states. In a similar way, the vast improvements provided by next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have revolutionized the genome-wide view on translation by different ribosomal profiling methods. It will be exciting to see at the meeting how the mechanistic insights from