ANZMAG 2006 at Murramarang Resort
[skip straight to photos below] Murramarang National Park was selected as the venue for the 2006 ANZMAG meeting - the 6th Biennial meeting of its kind. To be more precise, the Murramarang Resort was the venue - an "eco-resort" nestled within the national park, with fabulous beach frontage. The meeting was chaired by Gottfried Otting from ANU and the venue reflected his inclination towards the outdoors. Other committee members included Graham Ball, Jim Hook, Joel Mackay, Barbara Messerle, Konstantin Momot and Lindy Rae.
The conference, with about 180 attendees (normal for an ANZMAG meeting) was preceded by the user meetings of the two main manufacturers of NMR equipment, Bruker and Varian, which were attended by about half of the conference participants. Of particular notice was the continued development of new, more powerful NMR techniques with implications in all areas of magnetic resonance and the high standard of the presentations by the Australian and New Zealand MR community. The overwhelming majority of the projects was concerned with biochemical applications in one way or another.
For the first time at an ANZMAG conference, introductory lectures were held in the early morning (8:00 to 8:45 am) prior to the regular presentations. These lectures were given every day except for the morning following the conference dinner and presented by the expert overseas speakers. They were aimed at students who were familiar with the foundations of magnetic resonance but were not experts in all areas of MR techniques. Despite long days and competition with breakfast, the introductory lectures were outstandingly well attended and their usefulness was quietly acknowledged also by senior members of the MR community.
The ANZMAG medal was presented to Professor Ray Norton of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne. In his medal talk he pointed out the repeated situations of closure of his research institute on short notice, matched only by equal numbers of rescue positions found immediately afterwards. In spite of the vagaries of his carrier, he presented an impressive number of 3D structure determinations of biologically relevant proteins originating from his laboratory since the earliest days of structure determination by NMR spectroscopy.
Bruker, Varian, Novachem, ASBMB, BOC, Linde, Sigma-Aldrich, Jeol, Camo AS, Magritek, Doty, Spectra Stable Isotopes, Spin Systems, Elsevier, Kluwer/Springer, Philips , and Schiller Australia were important sponsors of the meeting. The sponsors made it possible to support the travel of graduate students from outside NSW/ACT, offer reduced registration fees for graduate students, provide drinks in the evenings and subsidize the conference dinner and bus transport from and to Sydney airport. Three oral and poster presentation prizes for students were presented at the conference dinner. The selection committee was composed of five prominent overseas speakers from all areas of magnetic resonance who took care to quiz the students at their posters or following their oral presentations. The three hard-earned prizes went to Kathryn Washburn (Victoria Institute of Wellington, NZ) for her talk on Multidimensional NMR inverse Laplace spectroscopy in porous media, Iain Murchland (Molecular and Biomedical Sciences, University of Adelaide) for his poster on Structure-based drug design to the liver oncoprotein Gankyrin) and Tim Larkin (Biochemistry, University of Sydney) for his poster on NMR studies of diffusion in bicontinuous cubic phases.
Because of the fabulous location, a range of outdoors activities were organized for the obligatory afternoon off, including kayaking on the pristine Lake Durras, a coastal walk between Pebbly Beach and Pretty Beach, a guided bushwalk by a local Aboriginal guide, surfing lessons (where we threw in a blue bottle for Gerhard Wagner at no extra cost) and golf for the "sportsmen". The weather was perfect for this afternoon and the activities were thoroughly enjoyed by participants.
Overall, the meeting went very well, with a mixture of great science and a great location.
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