The First European Symposium on Calcium-Binding Proteins in Normal and Transformed Cells was held at the Faculty of Medicine of the "Universit6 Libre de Bruxelles" in Brussels, Belgium, April 20-22, 1989. Delegates from seventeen countries attended. This Symposium was initiated through an EEC Stimulation Program. The formal program included forty verbal presentations by invited speakers and sixty miniposter presentations, and was formulated by the Organizing and Scientific Committee: E. Carmeliet (Leuven), J. P. Collin (Poitiers), S. Forsen (Lund), C. W. Heizmann (Ziirich), D. E. M. Lawson (Cambridge), P. Miroir (Brussels), J. L. Pasteels (Brussels) and R. Pochet (Brussels). This volume contains the papers prepared by the invited speakers. The contributions are grouped according to their general subject matter: Genes of Calcium-Binding Protein Family, Structure/Function Relationships, The Cytoskeleton and Calcium-Binding Proteins, Calcium-Binding Proteins in TransforlIled Cells, Calcium/Lipid-Binding Proteins, Calcium-Binding Proteins Substrates and Immunohistochemistry of Calbindin and Calretinin. The highlights of the symposium are numerous.
Among the items to be noted are the growing number of abundant proteins which interact with calcium and sometimes with other second messenger sys- tems; specifically pH associated with the tyrosine kinase calpactin, calcYclin, p9Ka induced by growth fac- tors, MRP-8 and MRP-14 (also called cystic fibrosis antigen, L1 or calgranulins) forming half the soluble protein of granulocytes. New structure/function relationships on calbindin D9K and calmodulin have emerged from nuclear magnetic resonance and site-directed mutagenesis studies.