Challenges of Water in Biological Systems
 
September 13-17, 2010
Overview
 
Water is essential for life. Without water, essentially all of life’s processes cease. Despite the importance of water, the functions of water in biological processes are still only incompletely known and understood. The leading biochemistry and cell biology texts treat water as a minor component.  Recent work has brought out ever more clearly the complexity of water itself, and of its role as an active participant, rather than just a simple spectator, in biological processes. This workshop aims to connect the biology, chemistry, and physics as well as experiment, computation, and theory, of the role of water in the structure and function of biomolecules.
 
Format
 
This workshop will focus on the open, unsolved challenges in the field.  We plan to have no invited speakers, only invited participants.  We will circulate papers, published and still unpublished, from all the participants, probably one or two from each.  We will also ask all the participants to suggest major unsolved problems that they believe might now be appropriate to address.  We will compile a unified master list of these challenges and identify one or two participants to present each topic for discussion.  Hence each session will be devoted to one of those subjects on the open-problems list.  A major goal of the workshop will be to enable new collaborations to form, that will pursue novel approaches to solving those now-open problems.
 
The list of participants consists of active, established workers in this field; we will encourage these senior participants to bring one or two younger people, typically postdoctoral associates or upper-level graduate students, so these people become part of the community trying to work at the forefront of the field.
 
Typical Substantive Topics
 
Some of the topics that may be among those the workshop would address are these:
 
  1. (1)To what extent do water molecules play an active, driving role in biological reactions?  For example, in processes exhibiting “slaving,” in which the spectrum of motions corresponds closely to the spectrum of motions of water molecules, to what extent do the interactions of water molecules actually control the reaction?
  2. (2)To what extent is water in cells perturbed significantly from the behavior of pure water?  How much intracellular water is like water in the absence of other species?  How much variation is there of the water molecules in different kinds of sites?
  3. (3)How can one distinguish water molecules in different kinds of sites, experimentally?  What can we learn from such categorization?
  4. (4)To what extent is water essential for biological processes?  Could there be surrogate or substitute species for water, in some biological processes?
  5. (5)As it becomes possible to identify water molecules in different kinds of sites in biomolecular structures, what can we do with that information that is useful?  Can we find ways to infer mechanisms and rates, for example, from such measurements?
H. Frauenfelder et al. PNAS 2009; 106:5129-5134
Cover photo from PNAS March 9, 2004
G. A. Papoian et al. PNAS 2004; 101: 3352-3357