On the 13th of May, the University of Barcelona will be holding a seminar entitled «Proteases and their Regulation from Molecular Structures to Application», led by Robert Huber, Nobel Price in Chemestry in 1998. The event, which will be held at 12h at the Magna Aula hall at the Faculty of Biology, has been organised by the Institute of Biomedicine of the University of Barcelona (IBUB), based at the Barcelona Science Park, and is addressed to doctorate students, post-doctoral researchers, principal investigators and research group leaders as well as to all those individuals interested in the current state of the art in the area of structural biology research and its applications, as in for instance, the field of the rational design of new drugs.

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The seminar will be co-ordinated by Eva Estébanez-Perpiñá (a Ramón y Cajal -Marie Curie researcher at IBUB), leader of the Nuclear Receptors research group located at the Helix building, with a long international trajectory in research acquired at the Max Planck Institute, where she completed her doctorate degree with Robert Huber, and at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF).

The Institute of Biomedicine of the University of Barcelona (IBUB), which is part of the University of Barcelona, was created in September 2006 and is directed under the leadership of professor Francesc Villarroya, from the Department of Biochemestry and Molecular Biology. With a strong interdisciplinary vocation and an integrating approach, the Institute offers a new research core facility intended to foster research work in the fields of biomedicine and life sciences at the UB. The institute is composed of scientific teams with a high-level research profile from the Faculties of Biology, Chemestry and Pharmacy of the University of Barcelona, groups with indicators of scientific production and fundraisers of first-level resources in the setting of biomedical research in Catalonia and Europe.

Robert Huber was born in Munic in1937, where he was trained and developed his entire professional backbone as a chemist and biochemist in the area of structural biology. From 1972 to 2005, he held the post of director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. At present, he is emeritus director of the Group of Structure Research of this institute, and co-founder director of the biotechnology company Proteros, located in the outskirts of the Max Planck institute. Prof. Huber received the Novel Price in Chemestry in 1988, shared with professors Deisenhoffer and Michel, for their studies on the 3D structure of the photosynthetic reaction centre of the purple bacterium Rhodopseudomonas viridis. This work is already a classic in biochemestry, as it became the first detailed structure of the central part of the photosynthetic machinery, essential for life, and the first three-dimensional structure of a membrane protein. These studies contributed to elucidate the structural basis for the transformation of light enery into chemical energy during photosynthesis. Robert Huber has authored 1178 scientific publications; he is editor of the prestigious Journal of Molecular Biology and has supervised a large number of doctoral theses. He was also conferred the Doctor Honoris Causa degree by the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), where holds a post as visiting professor.