Welcome
We hereby invite you to take part in the 19th “International Symposium on Calcium-Binding Proteins and Calcium Function in Health and Disease” (CaBP19). This series of symposia has since its very start had a clear molecular focus, with a strong emphasis on molecular and structural biology and biochemical and biophysical aspects of calcium signaling, in addition to featuring leading scientists in cell biology and medical sciences. The series was founded in 1973 with the leadership of Drs. Ernesto Carafoli, Witold Drabikowski, and Claude Klee, and has since then been held every two or three years in different locations over the world. The 19th CaBP symposium will be hosted at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Come enjoy renowned Southern US hospitality in one of America's fastest growing and most affordable cities!
An international organizing committee composed of experts in calcium-signaling and calcium-binding proteins provides guidance to the organization and scientific themes of the symposium. Check back for more information as planning progresses.
One important aspect of CaBP series of symposia is the avoidance of parallel sessions. Instead scientists from different backgrounds from physical chemistry to medicine listen to the same talks and engage in lively and very fruitful discussion that stimulate cross-disciplinary thinking and new collaborations. This promises to be a very exciting meeting with excellent opportunities to interact with well-known investigators in diverse areas of calcium signaling. We hereby invite you to participate in the Symposium, and to submit an abstract. We are looking forward to welcoming you in Nashville!
Ernesto Carafoli on the History of the symposia on calcium binding proteins and calcium function in health and disease: from Jablonna (1973) to Nashville (2015)
Those who will attend the Symposium are likely to have decided to do so after having considered a number of alternative options: an impressive number of Symposia on calcium signaling are indeed organized with increasing frequency in various parts of the world. The topic is now one of the most popular in cell biochemistry, biology, and physiology, and has been so for a number of years. What is important, it keeps expanding to novel areas, pathology being perhaps the most striking recent example. It may thus come as a surprise to the calcium aficionados of the younger generations that there was a time, only a short while ago, when calcium Symposia were a rarity, attended by a few selected connoisseurs, and covered a very limited range of topics: muscle and contraction mechanisms having been for a while the undisputed rulers. It all started in 1973, with the mythical first Calcium Symposium ever held in a castle in the outskirts of Warsaw: Jablonna. The idea of the Symposium originated during a dinner the late Witold (Witek) Drabikowski and I had in a quaint little restaurant in Paris in the Summer of 1972. At that time the idea of signaling by calcium was moving its first uncertain steps, having remained dormant for decades after the serendipitous, yet seminal, discovery by Sidney Ringer in 1883 that calcium was uniquely able to support the contraction of isolated hearts. That finding should have set the field in rapid motion: yet, it somehow didn’t. Only in the 1960s, thanks to a series of landmark discoveries, the ball started rolling, and by the early 1970s the field was just coming of age. The Symposium that followed our dinner conversation in Paris was thus a real first. It was attended by 81 scientists: the group was small by today’s standards, but it contained the entire Gotha of the field, and was truly memorable. In keeping with the predominant interest of the time, it emphasized muscle and problems of contraction, and focused on the protein biochemistry aspects of the emerging field. That was reflected in the title of the Symposium, which was, perhaps, impossibly long: “Calcium Binding Proteins and Calcium Function in Health and Disease”. The Committees that have organized the Symposia that followed the first one have nevertheless decided to keep it as a way to underline their specific emphasis on the molecular aspects of the topic: which differentiated them from the numerous other Calcium Signaling Symposia, centered essentially on cell biology, that quickly proliferated.
The Symposia of the ”Jablonna series” have then been organized at 2-3 years intervals in the USA (four times), in Japan (twice), in Italy (three times), in Canada (twice), in Sweden, Spain, Switzerland, Chile, and in Beijing. The Symposium in Nashville will thus be the 19th.
For a few years after the Jablonna Symposium, the Proceedings were published. In those early days Symposia Proceedings were considered a valuable vehicle for the publication of important new results, and were widely cited. Remarkably, the 950 page volume of the Jablonna Symposium contains articles that are still cited today. As the practice of publishing proceedings has waned, the role of these Symposia has now become that of presenting in real time the most exciting findings made in Laboratories from all over the world, and to discuss them with the purpose of generating new ideas and of promoting collaborations. In this, according to the general consensus of those who have attended, our Symposia have been remarkably effective. The Symposium in Nashville hopes to attract a community from all over the world to the newest in the calcium signaling area.