Scope:

Dyneins are gigantic motor proteins that power directional movement along microtubules. First identified in 1965, their large size and complexity have for many years made the elucidation of their cellular and molecular mechanisms challenging. The pace of dynein research has increased dramatically in the last decade and the field now has unprecedented insights into the structure, mechanism, and cell biology of these giant motors. The dynein superfamily is functionally diverse but can be divided into axonemal dyneins, that work in ensembles to power the beating movement of cilia and flagella, and cytoplasmic dyneins that participate in moving intracellular cargos within the cytoplasm or within cilia and flagella.

We are in an unprecedented era of understanding the structure of both types of dyneins thanks to the revolution in cryo-EM. We now have structures of cytoplasmic and axonemal dyneins, and an increasing knowledge of the architecture of the cilium. Advances in in vitro reconstitutions and precise biophysical measurements have revealed surprising details about how dyneins step along microtubules, produce force, and are regulated by intramolecular and intermolecular interactions. Cell biological studies have revealed a plethora of unanticipated physiological roles for cytoplasmic dyneins, and surprisingly elaborate pathways for the assembly of axonemal dyneins. Genetic studies are increasing our knowledge of how defects in dynein functions underlies human diseases. By all measures, we are in a golden era of breakthroughs for understanding the roles of dynein in biology!

The Dynein International Workshop has been held every four years in Japan since 2005. It brings together the broader dynein field to share novel results, network with others, open new collaborations across disciplines, and stay abreast of the latest research. The dynein workshop has been a cornerstone of the field for almost two decades. Its continuation will ensure vital communication and collegiality, and provide opportunities for junior researchers to disseminate their work and establish new connections. With the advent of the COVID pandemic in 2020 preventing travel across the globe, the next International Workshop on Dynein will be held online in 2021 in order to ensure this vital resource for the field continues.   

The scope of the Virtual International Workshop on Dynein 2021 will be the molecular and cellular mechanisms that control, distribute, and regulate dynein activity in cellular homeostasis and human disease. The meeting will broadly cover both cytoplasmic and ciliary/axonemal dyneins and their cellular functions. The live program will cover two short (4 hour) days, timed so participants can attend from all over the world.  There will be two talk sessions each day, with all talks selected from abstracts. Talks will be recorded and available to participants after the live session. Round table/networking sessions will facilitate interactions between participants.  Poster presentations will be recorded and available to download, with questions and discussion taking place online throughout the meeting.

A focus of the meeting will be to aid and integrate early career researchers with a strong interest in dynein biology into the larger dynein research community.

Topics:

Meeting topics will include:

1. Cytoplasmic dynein regulation
2. Cytoplasmic dynein cargo interactions
3. Dynein motor biophysics
4. Cytoplasmic and ciliary dynein structures
5. Intraflagellar transport
6. Mechanisms of cilia beating and axonemal dynein regulation
7. Dynein assembly
8. Dyneins in human disease

Dates of the meeting: September 8th & 9th 2021

Live Programme (4 hours each day for 2 days):

The live talk sessions and Round Tables discussions will take place via Zoom.  Posters and Networking by gather.town

Start and end times:

• 6:00 AM-10:00AM San Francisco,
• 9:00AM-1:00PM New York,
• 2:00-6:00PM London,
• 3:00-7:00 PM Berlin,
• 6:30 PM-10:30PM Mumbai,
• 10:00PM-2:00AM Tokyo,
• 11:00PM-3:00AM Sydney (note end times in Tokyo and Sydney are +1 day)

Talk Sessions:

All talks were selected from submitted abstracts and are typically (15 mins + 5 mins for questions).  All talks will be hosted live via Zoom Webinar.

September 8th

Time (UK)	Speaker	Title
1.00 PM	Poster presenters at their posters (optional) – gather.town
1.50 PM	Andrew Carter, Richard McKenney	Welcome

Session 1: Dynein and kinesin

Time (UK)	Speaker	Title
2.00 PM	Anne Straube	Co-operation of KIF1C and dynein in bidirectional cargo transport
2.20 PM	John Canty	In vitro reconstitution defines mitochondrial TRAK cargo adaptors as activators of dynein and kinesin
2.40 PM	Reto Gassman	JIP3 recruits dynein and kinesin-1 to regulate bi-directional organelle transport in neurons
3.00 PM	Ennio d’Amico	Conformational changes of the activating adaptor Spindly underlies Dynein regulation at the kinetochore

Networking/Round Table Discussions

Time (UK)
3.30 PM	Round Table Discussions (Zoom links sent to registered participants) Networking/Posters – gather.town

Session 2: Chair – Axonemal dyneins

Time (UK)	Speaker	Title
4.40 PM	Win Sale	Ian and Barbara Gibbons Award Introduction
4.55 PM	Kai Zhang	Gibbons Lecture: Structures of outer-arm dynein array bound to microtubule doublet reveal a motor coordination mechanism
5.20 PM	Hiroshi Yamaguchi	Efcab1 stabilizes the docking of outer arm dyneins onto ciliary microtubule in vertebrates.
5.40 PM	Rui Zhang	High-resolution cryo-EM structures of the mechanoregulatory complexes within the axoneme
6.00 PM	Poster presenters at their posters (optional) – gather.town

September 9th

Time (UK)	Speaker	Title
1.00 PM	Poster presenters at their posters (optional) – gather.town

Session 3: IFT transport and ciliary dynein beating

Time (UK)	Speaker	Title
2.00 PM	Jordan Mareike	In situ cryo-EM shows that IFT-dynein is transported in an inactive conformation on anterograde intraflagellar transport trains to ensure unidirectional anterograde movement in cilia
2.20 PM	Aakash Mukhopadhyay	Intermediate chains assemble dynein-2 into an autoinhibited dimer to regulate intraflagellar transport
2.40 PM	Noemi Zimmerman	Cryo-electron tomography revealed multiple conformations of outer arm dyneins at various stages of force generation
3.00 PM	Hermes Gadelha	Dynein orchestration of the multi-scale components of mammalian sperm flagella and its implication on the 3D flagellar beating

Networking/Round Table Discussions

Time (UK)
3.30 PM	Round Table Discussions (Zoom links sent to registered participants) Networking/Posters – gather.town

Session 4: Cell biology of dyneins

Time (UK)	Speaker	Title
4.30 PM	Jaclyn Fingerhut	mRNA localization mediates maturation of cytoplasmic cilia in Drosophila spermatogenesis
4.50 PM	Addanki Triumala Nireekshit	Single molecule imaging of cytoplasmic dynein reveals the mechanism of cargo capture and motor activation
5.10 PM	Aga Kendrick	Cytoplasmic dynein-1 cargo diversity is mediated by the combinatorial assembly of FTS-Hook-FHIP complexes
5.30 PM	Sydney Cason	Multiple dynein effector proteins act sequentially to drive autophagosome transport in axons
5.50 PM	Kazu Oiwa	Summary and close
6.10	Poster presenters at their posters (optional) – gather.town

Round-table discussions:

Round table discussions present an opportunity for meeting attendees to interact with junior and senior group leaders in the cytoplasmic and axonemal dynein fields (see list below). These sessions will be limited to small groups to facilitate connections with the designated table leader. Each covers a distinct theme, ranging from active research questions to career topics, but leaders and participants are encouraged to allow the discussion to develop organically in any interesting direction they choose. The round tables are particularly encouraged for junior scientists as an opportunity to meet and discuss relevant topics of interest for their future careers. When you register please select all those round tables you would be interested in attending.  Slots will be filled on a first come, first serve basis and attendees will typically expect to attend one slot.  The discussions will be via zoom with links sent directly to participants by email before the meeting.

Start Time: 7.30 AM Pacific Time, 9.30 AM Central Time, 10.30 AM Eastern Time, 3.30 PM UK, 4.30 PM Europe, 8.00 PM India, 11.30 PM Japan, 0.30 AM (+1 day) Australia

Wednesday  8^th September

Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan: Single Molecule Studies of Dynein

Susan Dutcher: Preassembly of Axonemal Dyneins

Erika Holzbaur: Cytoplasmic Dynein in Disease

Joe Howard: Mechanisms of ciliary beating.

Tomomi Kiyomitsu: Dynein in Mitosis

Guangshuo Ou: IFT Dynein in C. elegans

Gaia Pigino: Structural Biology of IFT

Sam Reck-Peterson: Career as an Academic Scientist

Thursday September 9th

Alan Brown and Rui Zhang: Structural Biology of Axonemes

Morgan DeSantis: Dynein Regulation

Ken’ya Furuta: Engineering Dyneins

Roop Mallik: Dynein Biophysics

Miriam Schmidts: Genetics of Human Ciliary Dynein Diseases

Thomas Surrey: In Vitro Reconstitution

Ron Vale: Career as an Academic Scientist

John Wallingford: Axonemal Dynein Assembly

Networking/Poster Sessions:

If you are not attending a round table discussion you are welcome to visit posters or join us in the Gather.town Foyer for informal discussions.

Poster presenters will submit a pdf poster (A4 size/landscape orientation) and a 5-minute video presentation.  Attendees will watch at their leisure (either downloading via the meeting website or Gather.town).  Participants will be able to contact poster presenter directly and set up a time to talk one-on-one.  Presenters also have the opportunity to be at their posters in Gather.town for an hour before and/or after the meeting and during the Network/Poster sessions between live talks.

2021 Ian and Barbara Gibbons Gold Award Winner Seminar

Kai Zhang (Yale University)

Ian and Barbara Gibbons Award Announcement

4^th August 2021

We are pleased to announce the winners of the first Ian and Barbara Gibbons Award. Ian and Barbara discovered and named the dynein motor, and dedicated their long research careers to the study of dyneins. This new award in their honor is supported by a generous donation from the Gibbons family and from support by Cytoskeleton Inc. (https://www.cytoskeleton.com).

This year, the Award Committee received and evaluated 22 outstandingly strong applications from diverse branches of the dynein field. We would like to thank all of the stellar applicants for participating and look forward to future iterations of the Gibbons Award!

We are pleased to announce two prizes:

Gold Award: The committee selected first author Qinhui Rao and new PI Kai Zhang for their work titled “Cryo-EM structures of outer-arm dynein array bound to microtubule doublet reveal a mechanism for motor coordination”. This beautiful work provides stunning cryo-EM structures of full outer-arm dynein complexes bound via their motor domains to microtubules. In addition to revealing high-resolution structural details of the dynein motors, these structures reveal a mechanism for inter-dynein coordination that provides a molecular basis for how large dynein arrays within the axoneme coordinate their chemomechanical cycles to produce movement within cilia and flagella. The committee recognizes that this work, along with similarly impactful findings on outer-arm dynein structures from the labs of Andrew Carter, Alan Brown and Huy Bui, will greatly influence the future of research on the structure, mechanism and biology of axonemal dyneins.

The winners will give the Gibbons Award lecture at the virtual Dynein 2021 meeting and receive a cash prize.  Their elegant work can be found on the pre-print server BioRxiv: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.08.415687v1.full.pdf+html

The complementary studies can be found here:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6532/910

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20735-7

https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embr.202152911

Silver Award: For the second place Silver award, the committee selected a group nomination consisting of first authors Zaw Htet, John Gillies, and senior author Morgan DeSantis (in Samara Reck-Peterson’s Group) and Mohamed Elshenawy (in Ahmet Yildiz’s group) for their combined works on the regulation of cytoplasmic dynein activity by the protein LIS1. The committee recognized the group effort of this work, spanning multiple independent labs that came to the same conclusion about the role of LIS1 in activating the autoinhibited form of cytoplasmic dynein. The committee recognizes that this work transforms the field’s understanding of the regulation and activation of cytoplasmic dynein and was especially impressed with the collaborative effort and cooperative spirit of the published studies. Similar conclusions in non-mammalian model organisms were also published by the Markus and Xiang labs at the same time, providing a strong foundation on which the field will no doubt base future research directions.

All four awardees share a cash prize. 

The Htet, Gilles and Desantis study is found here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41556-020-0506-z

The Elshenawy study is here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41556-020-0501-4

The complementary studies can be found here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41556-020-0492-1

https://rupress.org/jcb/article/218/11/3630/120925/LIS1-regulates-cargo-adapter-mediated-activation

The Ian and Barbara Gibbons Award Committee

Richard McKenney, Reto Gassmann, Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan, Ken’ya Furuta, Masahide Kikkawa, Pleasantine Mill, Khanh Huy Bui

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The Ian and Barbara Gibbons Award

Scope: The award is for a published piece of work by a junior researcher or researchers that has made a significant impact in the dynein field since the last International Workshop.

Eligibility: Any current PhD student, postdoc or junior faculty (defined as pre-tenure or within 5 years of starting their lab) who has published a first author paper in the dynein field since the last dynein meeting in 2017.  Junior faculty who have made a major experimental contribution to a paper on which they are corresponding author are also eligible. 

Application: Candidates need to register for the meeting. They will be asked to write a short (max 500 word) justification listing the relevant paper, explaining the work’s impact and their contribution. The deadline for applications is July 1st 2021.

Many papers are the result of collaborations between multiple authors.  We encourage applications that recognise this.  Either all relevant authors can apply separately and cross reference each other’s applications.  Alternatively, one author can apply, list all those who should be considered and their contributions.

Selection: All applications will be considered by the Organizing Committee. The awardee(s) will be selected based on the work considered to have made the greatest contribution to the dynein field since the last dynein international workshop. The Committee will consider the impact of the work and the contribution of the authors. Senior authors may be contacted to clarify the role played by the candidates.