French Crystallographic Association: Difference between revisions

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The French Crystallographic Association (AFC) brings together physicists, chemists and biologists that use crystals and crystallography in their research or develop new crystallographic methods. Originally part of the French Society of Mineralogy, the AFC was founded in 1953 by Hubert Curien and André Guinier. Today, its main goals are to promote dissemination of knowledge and exchange between French speaking crystallographers from all fields, and in particular to organize or support specialized or interdisciplinary workshops and conferences, educational actions and training courses in the area of crystallography. During the biannual AFC conferences, the AFC awards three PhD prizes in each of its research areas: Physics, Chemistry and Biology.

Philippe Guionneau, Professor at the Institut de Chimie et de la Matière Condensée in Bordeaux is the current President of the AFC.

Former presidents

René Guinebretière (2013-2016)
Jacqueline Cherfils (2011-2013)
Jean-Claude Daran (2008-2010)
Jean-Louis Hodeau (2003-2007)
Claude Lecomte (1997-2002)
Roger Fourme (1994-1997)
Massimo Marezio (1990-1993)
Michel Hospital (1987-1990)
Jean-François Petroff (1984-1987)
Jean Meinnel (1981-1983)
Stanislas Goldstaub
Jean Wyart
Robert Gay
André Guinier (président de l’Union Internationale de Cristallographie de 1969 à 1972)

AFC conferences

IUCr-3 ----- Paris (1954)
AFC62 ----- Bordeaux
ECM-1 ----- Bordeaux (1973)
AFC83 ----- Lille
AFC88 ----- Lyon
IUCr-15 ----- Bordeaux (1990)
AFC92 ----- Paris
AFC93 ----- Strasbourg
AFC95 ----- Grenoble
AFC98 ----- Orléans
ECM-19 ---- Nancy (2000)
AFC2001 --- Orsay
AFC2003 --- Caen
AFC2006 --- Toulouse
AFC2008 --- Rennes
AFC2010 --- Strasbourg
AFC2013 --- Bordeaux
AFC2016 --- Marseille
AFC2018 --- Lyon
AFC2020 --- Grenoble (to be held)

External links

Website of the French Crystallographic Association

@@ Line 22: / Line 22: @@
 * Robert Gay
 * [[André Guinier]] (président de l’Union Internationale de Cristallographie de 1969 à 1972)
-==The AFC at the Crossroads of Disciplines ==
-[[Crystallography]] studies crystals from the atomic to the macroscopic scale. These crystals may be composed of atoms, ions, organic molecules or biological macromolecules, but they may also be quasi-crystalline objects such as those of material physicists. Experimental methods, instrumentation and fields of research of crystallography thus cover areas of physics, chemistry and biology, but also mathematics, which play an essential role in structural determination methods. Crystallography is thus one of the finest examples of scientific interdisciplinarity. Today, it continues to face many challenges at the crossroads of these disciplines.
-Structural analysis in chemistry was originally an engine for the development of crystallography.
-Chemical crystallography is nowadays implanted in all laboratories of organic or inorganic chemistry. It is an indispensable tool to characterize the structure of original molecules and to understand the relationship between the structure, the reactivity and the physical (electrical, magnetic, optical etc.) properties of these molecules. Developments in instrumentation (eg. detectors) and in methodology (eg. charge-flipping, charge density) combine to describe the structures more and more finely, to integrate information from other structural and physicochemical approaches, and thereby strengthen the link between theory (modeling) and experiments. A current trend, which is also observed in physics, is to go towards the study of objects that are not strictly periodic, as illustrated by the new formalisms of incommensurate modulated structures. The 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to [[Dan Shechtman]] for his discovery of quasi-crystals in the 90's.
-This evolution of crystallography towards the study of systems that are not perfectly periodic is also seen in physics. Crystallographic research in physics mostly involves the study of materials in their environmental conditions or in their shaping. They include surface diffraction applications (thin layers, multilayers, surfaces), the study of structural transitions and the study of microstructural characteristics (textures, faults, crystalline perfection). As in chemistry, the association of several experimental methods (diffraction, spectroscopy, tomography) is increasingly relevant. The study of nano-objects, and in particular their formation in situ, constitutes a new research direction that is rapidly spreading within the crystallographic community. In terms of methods, it is important to highlight the development of new structural methods, which aim at exploiting complexities such as anomalous/resonant scattering, diffuse scattering or coherent diffusion, not by eliminating them as corrective terms, but by processing them as complementary data in order to go beyond diffraction. These methodological advances resulting from problems encountered in physics may find additional applications in chemistry or in biology.
-In the field of structural biology, the new challenges include the study of very large protein assemblies and of membrane proteins. They are probably the largest molecular objects analyzed in crystallography, often fragile, and capable of important structural rearrangements in order to carry out their biological functions. To build this structural film at the atomic scale, the main developments can be found in the hands of biochemists, who have to reconstitute these assemblies in vitro and invent methods to trap them in specific conformations within crystals, in terms of synchrotron instrumentation and data collection strategies for the diffraction of these particularly fragile crystals with low diffractive power, and new mathematical and physical methodologies to exploit all information rather than bypassing it by corrective terms. As in chemistry and physics, structural biology now increasingly relies on integration of other structural methods that do not require crystalline samples, such as cryo electron-microscopy (cryoEM), small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The crystal structures of the ribosome, a gigantic biological factory composed of proteins and RNAs that is responsible for protein synthesis, or G-protein coupled receptors with 7 transmembrane helices, are magnificent examples of these new advances. Three crystallographers (V. Ramakrishnan, T.A. Steitz and A. Yonath) received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 for solving the structure of the ribosome. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2012 was awarded to B. Kobilka for the crystallographic structure of a G-protein coupled transmembrane receptor in complex with the intracellular G protein published in 2011, price shared with R. Lefkowitz for the discovery of these receptors.
 == AFC conferences ==
@@ Line 52: / Line 43: @@
 * AFC2013 --- Bordeaux
 * AFC2016 --- Marseille
-* AFC2018 --- Lyon (to be held)
+* AFC2018 --- Lyon
+* AFC2020 --- Grenoble (to be held)
-== GTBio-AFC Meetings ==
-* 1991 --- Meeting of French-speaking Protein Crystallographers in Cassis
-* 1993 --- Meeting of French-speaking Protein Crystallographers in Mont Saint Odile
-* 1996 --- Meeting of AFC Biology Section in Toulouse
-* 1999 --- Meeting of AFC Biology Section in Hourtin
-* 2004 --- Meeting of AFC Biology Section in Grenoble
-* 2007 --- Meeting of AFC Biology Section in Lille
-* 2009 --- Meeting of AFC Biology Section in Paris
-* 2012 --- Meeting of AFC Biology Section in Montpellier
-* 2014 --- Meeting of AFC Biology Section in Grenoble
-* 2016 --- Meeting of AFC Biology Section in Obernai co-organized with the French Biophysics Society (SFB; Société Française de Biophysique)
-* 2019 --- Meeting of AFC Biology Section in Toulouse (to be held)
-== 2014 International Year of Crystallography ==
-On 3 July 2012, the United Nations decided during their general assembly that 2014 was to be the International Year of Crystallography (IYCr 2014). The opening ceremony took place 21 and 22 January 2017 in the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. In France, events for the general public, exhibitions, conferences etc. took place throughout the year 2014.
-== The AFC and the general public ==
-The AFC published a book entitled 200 years of crystallography in France on the occasion of the XVth Congress of the International Union of Crystallography, organized by France in 1990. This book presents portraits of French crystallographers that marked the history of crystallography since the XVIIIth century:
-*[[Jean-Baptiste Romé de L'Isle]] ;
-*[[René Just Haüy]] ;
-*[[Gabriel Delafosse]] ;
-*[[Louis Pasteur]] ;
-*[[Auguste Bravais]] ;
-*[[Pierre Curie]] ;
-*[[Georges Friedel]] ;
-*[[Charles Mauguin]] ;
-*[[André Guinier]] ;
-*[[Hubert Curien]].
-More recently, in 2009, in partnership with the Grenoble Museum, the AFC organized an exhibition on crystals, entitled "A Journey into Crystals" <ref>{{cite web|title=Voyage dans le Cristal - ''A Journey into Crystals''|url=http://www.iucr.org/index.html/leading-article/2009/2009-07-20|website=IUCr|access-date=18 September 2010}}</ref> that retraces the history of crystallography and illustrates its multiple facets.
 == See also ==
 *[[International Union of Crystallography]]
-== Notes and references ==
-{{reflist}}
 == External links ==
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-* [http://www.afc.asso.fr/ Website of the French Crystallographic Association]
+* [https://www.afc.asso.fr/ Website of the French Crystallographic Association]
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