CONFERENCE REPORT
17th Naples Workshop on Bioactive Peptides
Naples, Italy, 16-18 June 2022.
The 17th Naples Workshop on Bioactive Peptides has been held at the Congress Center of the University of Naples ‘Federico II’ on June 16-18, 2022. The event has had a high attendance of over 200 peptide scientists of different countries from all over the world. The workshop was held under the auspices of the European Peptide Society (EPS) and of the Italian Peptide Society (ItPS) and has been organized by a joint effort of the Interuniversity Research Center on Bioactive Peptides (CIRPEB) and by Department of Pharmacy at University of Naples ‘Federico II’, by the Institute of Biostructures and Bioimages, and the Institute of Crystallography of the Italian C.N.R. The theme of the workshop “Emerging Peptide Science in 2022” was covered by several plenary lectures, oral presentations, and poster presentations.
Group photo on the building stair.
The workshop has been organized in ten sessions to cover the different scientific topics. The first day was essentially dedicated to “Antimicrobial Peptides” and to “Peptides in Diagnostic and Therapeutic Applications”. The plenary lecture of Prof. Roger Raines (USA) entitled “Lessons from collagens” opened the workshop. The same day hosted the plenary lecture of Sam Gellman (USA) entitled “Impact of Backbone Modifications on Informational Properties of Polypeptides” that joined the meeting in remote modality from his study. The second day started with the plenary lecture of Kalina Hristova (USA). The plenary lectures of Meritxell Texeido (Spain) and Helma Wennemers (Switzerland) concerning peptides for new therapeutical applications were also hosted on Friday 17th. In the same day was also organized a peptide showcase session to give opportunity to companies developing peptide therapeutics and related technologies to present their results to symposium participants. The last day of the meeting was dedicated to peptides in chemical biology, peptides in immunology and to bioconjugation, folding and aggregation of peptides. The lectures from Alessandro Moretto (Italy), Roger Cone (USA), Christian Becker (Austria), Maurizio Pellecchia (USA) and Christian Heinis (Switzerland) were presented. At the end of the scientific sessions, the gala dinner, was also much appreciated by the participants. Finally, on Sunday 19th, was organized a special trip in Capri with visit of the marine caves from a boat and relaxing and interesting tours in Capri and Anacapri.
A total of 10 invited plenary lectures and 48 oral presentations were given in the 3 days of the workshop. Furthermore, a rather substantial number of poster presentations were also enriching the program, covering the various aspects of peptides as therapeutics, diagnostics, vaccines, and in material science.
The scientific content of the invited lectures, short oral, and poster presentations certainly reflected the state of the art in several specific aspects of the topic of the workshop; the investigations presented were indeed representative examples of emerging subjects, which highlighted the field of continuously increasing biologically important and ‘man-made’ peptide systems. One common feature, which ideally connected the different subjects covered, was the ‘molecular approach’ used by the various authors in tackling the problem of understanding the structure–activity relationships of bioactive peptides.
The chairmen: Michele Saviano, Giancarlo Morelli, Menotti Ruvo and Paolo Grieco (from left).
The Naples meeting has been, once again, a highly successful forum for the exchange of ideas on hot subjects and trends in peptide science and an important and decisive stimulus for future work in the area. The pleasant weather of Naples, offered to participants, beside science, the occasion of enjoying the city with its museums, monuments, and natural beauty.
Contributed by Giancarlo Morelli