The last day of our conference started this morning with two plenary talks on “Engineering the ribosome for expanded polymer biosynthesis” and “Computational design of functional protein repertoires”. After a short coffee break, there were two more speakers. They spoke about “Liquid crystalline phase engineering of non-symmetric silyl-branched azobenzene polycatenars” and “Proteins as we don’t know them – creating primordial-like proteins from ancient amino acids”.

The conference has thus come to a successful conclusion. We would like to thank all speakers for their exciting presentations and the participants for their discussions and inputs. Now we wish everyone a pleasant journey home and a nice weekend.

The first half of our second conference day was filled with contributed talks on „Late-Stage Functionalizations“, „A New Triple Layer System for Studying Membrane Proteins”, „Controlling Supramolecular Assemblies with Peptidic Scaffolds“ and „Hydrogen bonding motifs in hydroxy- and carboxy-functionalized ionic liquids“. In the discussions that followed, the participants in the audience had the opportunity to ask questions.

In the second part of yesterday’s conference day there was a plenary talk on “London Dispersion in Molecular Catalysis” by Peter Schreiner. This was followed by some time for flash talks in which research projects were presented. They also provided an appetizer for the subsequent poster session. The day ended with a joint conference dinner at the Steintor-Varieté. The third and final day is about to begin with further exciting inputs.

Yesterday, on March 19th, was the first day of our three-day conference. In addition to exciting presentations by external speakers, MLU students and BEAM members also gave talks. In the afternoon there was time for our social program. One group went up the Hausmannstürme and was rewarded with a magnificent view of Halle, another group was given an hour and a half guided tour of the city. Today we continue with lots of great presentations. Stay tuned.