LA is a city full of neon, LEDs, and fluorescent lights at all hours of the day, put to numerous purposes: advertising, decoration, safety, and spectacle.
The 69th Biophysical Society Annual Meeting, too, is full of light. I’m not referring to the fluorescent lights or projectors illuminating the session halls, nor the sunlight peaking in through the facade-spanning windows of the Los Angeles Convention Center, nor even of the electronic billboards that cast their bright advertisements across the street. No, I’m referring to light on a molecular level, brought into focus by the Biological Fluorescence subgroup on Subgroup Saturday, the first full day of events for BPS 2025.
The Biological Fluorescence meeting focused on several different aspects of fluorescence across fields. One of the most striking things about the subgroup was the broad range of topics that were covered. In many talks, changes in the photophysics of a fluorescent molecule were used to report on biological readouts, including in the very first talk of the day by Marcia Levitus, where she very neatly explained the relationship between 2-aminopurine fluorescence lifetime and DNA flexibility. Still others highlighted new ways to modulate biological fluorescence, such as the reveal of mCherry as a reporter of molecular crowding by Eitan Lerner, examining through spectroscopic and molecular modeling methods how the protein shape itself is modified to affect fluorescence. Even chemistry had its turn, as Luke Lavis, recipient of the Gregorio Weber Award, talked about the development and dissemination of the JaneliaFluor dyes. The highlighting of these different areas of research, and more, brought into focus the broad influence and application of light in biophysics research, and how it can bring together many fields sometimes seen as disparate.
In many ways, this is a lot like biophysics as an overarching field, and this conference. People come from many experience levels and backgrounds, from across departments at their home institutions: chemistry, biology, physics, engineering, and more. But all can be biophysics, and all have a place here at this meeting — and in the spotlight.