Local Organizing Committee

Russ Hille, Department of Biochemistry, University of California, Riverside (Chair)
Kylie Allen, Department of Biochemistry, Virginia Tech University
Eunsuk Kim, Department of Chemistry, Brown University
Cedric Owens, Schmid College of Science and Technology, Chapman University
Chad Saltikov, Dept Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology, University of California, Santa Cruz
Jarett Wilcoxen, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

MoTEC History

In the 1970’s and early 1980’s The Climax Molybdenum Company (later AMAX) sponsored several meetings on the chemistry and uses of molybdenum. The principal focus of these meetings was chemistry and chemical engineering, but they invariably included one or more sessions on enzymes that possessed molybdenum (which at the time was limited to nitrogenase, xanthine oxidase, sulfite oxidase and the assimilatory nitrate reductase from plants).

The first meeting focusing principally on the biology and biochemistry of molybdenum was organized by Robert C. Bray and Russ Hille, April 12-14, 1997, at the University of Sussex as a satellite meeting of the annual meeting of Biochemical Society of the United Kingdom that year. The Sussex meeting brought together a large and international contingent of biochemists and molecular biologists, and was enthusiastically received by the participants. It became clear that the community was large enough to sustain a regular meeting of its own, and subsequent discussion among workers in the field led to the suggestion of a Molybdenum and Tungsten Enzymes Gordon Conference, and a successful application for the creation of such a meeting was prepared by Ed Stiefel and Russ Hille. This Gordon Conference, which included a strong contingent of synthetic and physical inorganic chemists (notably absent from the Sussex meeting owing to a scheduling conflict with an annual meeting of the American Chemical Society) was held every other year from 1999 to 2009 with the organizers indicated below, with sites alternating between the US and Europe.

1999 Plymouth State College, Plymouth USA (Edward I. Stiefel and Russ Hille)
2001 The Queen’s College, Oxford, UK (C. David Garner and Ralf. R.R. Mendel)
2003 Kimball Union Academy, USA (John H. Enemark and Rudolf K. Thauer)
2005 The Queen’s College, Oxford, UK (Michael K. Johnson and Tracy Palmer)
2007 Colby-Sawyer College, USA (Alastair G. McEwan and Caroline Fl. Kisker)
2009 Renaissance, Il Ciocco, IT (Martin L. Kirk and Maria João Romão)

The Gordon Conference series was discontinued after 2009, but its place, an independently organized Molybdenum and Tungsten Enzymes Conference was established, the first such meeting being organized by Joel Weiner at the University of Edmonton August 3-6, 2011, immediately prior to the ICBIC 15 meeting in Vancouver that year. Again, it was evident that the community was sufficiently large and active to sustain such a regular meeting. The second of these independently organized meetings was held July 16-19 2013 Sintra, Portugal immediately prior to ICBIC 16 in Grenoble, France, and was hosted by José Moura, Isabel Moura, Luisa Maia and Maria João Romão. This meeting for the first time included a significant contingent of workers on nitrogenase, which had previously held a separate Gordon Conference focusing exclusively on that enzyme. The inclusion of the nitrogenase theme was viewed by all as a very positive development, and has been a component of all subsequent meetings. The next meeting was held at Lake Balatonfüred, Hungary, September 6-10, 2015, hosted by Günter Schwarz and Katrin Fischer-Schrader of the University of Cologne, and it was here that the name Molybdenum and Tungsten Enzymes Meeting (MoTEC) was first adopted. Subsequent meetings were held in Santa Fe, NM (2017, hosted by Sharon Burgmayer and Martin Kirk), Potsdam, Germany (2019, hosted by Silke Leimkühler) and Indianapolis, IN (2022, hosted by Partha Basu). A virtual MoTEC meeting was held in 2021. Organized by Axel Magalon due to COVID-related travel restrictions.

Although focused on molybdenum- and tungsten-containing enzymes, The MoTEC series has had great breadth, dealing not only with the structural and functional characterization of molybdenum- and tungsten-containing enzymes, but also chemical and computational modeling of them (from both a structural and functional standpoint), bioinformatics analysis of their biological distribution, cell biology, cofactor biosynthesis, intracellular trafficking and insertion.

The present meeting constitutes the fifteenth in the series, stretching back to the University of Sussex meeting in 1997. The field has expanded greatly in that time, in terms of the number of principal investigators working in the field, the breadth of approaches employed and the number of enzymes studied (now exceeding 100 on the basis of the most recent genomics analyses).