Mark your calendars! The BPS will hold three thematic meetings in 2020 that will explore focused topics from varying perspectives.
Biophysics at the Dawn of Exascale Computers
Hamburg, Germany
May 12–15, 2020
Over the next decade molecular biophysics will be dominated by three technologies: electron microscopy and tomography, X-ray lasers, and machine learning. Integrating these technologies with molecular simulations will provide an unprecedented wealth of structural and dynamical data, from the detail of atomic interactions to movies of cellular functions. This meeting will prepare the biophysics community to start advancing the development and implementation of innovative algorithms at the dawn of the exascale computing era.
The advent of graphical processor units in the past 10 years has revolutionized our ability to tackle larger molecules over longer simulation times. This revolution has allowed the field to push from petascale computer facilities to the recent exascale computers, such as Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit supercomputer. The exascale computing initiative will mature in 2020 with the installation of the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and two more at Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Growing from peta- to exaflop performance will result in the production of three orders of magnitude more data, and at least an order of magnitude speedup. Biophysics will benefit from these technological advances, notably in the areas of diffraction data and single-particle image processing, hybrid modeling, molecular dynamics and free-energy calculations, as well as drug discovery, all front runners to leverage the unparalleled capacity of exascale computing.
Spatial Organization of Biological Functions
Bangalore, India
August 16–19, 2020
Recent studies have shown that the dynamic spatial organization of different molecular components and activities within a cell and different cells within a tissue or community play critical roles in enabling the full functionality of the organism. As the significance of this field has been increasingly appreciated, it is now time to bring together leading scientists in the studies of the spatial organization of biological functions to discuss current advances, share expertise, and most importantly, define the underlying biophysical principles.
This thematic meeting will focus on a diverse set of topics such as intracellular functional compartmentalization, molecular organizations in the membrane and in the cytosol, three-dimensional architecture of physical compartments and cellular activities, pattern formation at different length and time scales, tissue structures, biofilms, and host-commensal organizations.
Physical and Quantitative Approaches to Overcome Antibiotic Resistance
Stockholm, Sweden
August 30–September 2, 2020
Antibiotic resistance is a pressing global challenge to human health, threatening to reverse many of the great health advances of the 20th century. In response to this challenge, the global scientific community has mobilized to address both the microbiological and the medicinal-chemistry aspects of antibiotic resistance. This meeting will bring together biophysical and bioengineering researchers working to diagnose, understand, and overcome antibiotic resistance. Key questions that will be addressed include: how do the limitations of (1) target recognition, (2) enzymatic degradation, and (3) small-molecule uptake shape the available space of antibiotics; how do bacteria communicate and interact as multicellular communities; how does bacterial small-molecule transport function so differently than mammalian cell small-molecule transport; and how does the extracellular environment reinforce antibiotic resistance. Engineering approaches and the biophysical methodologies of spectroscopy, single-molecule and single-cell microscopy, computational modeling, and development of functional assays are uniquely suited to help answer these questions.
This meeting seeks to explore the interface between biophysical research and the microbiology of drug resistance, highlighting the breadth of work that spans these two fields and encouraging new synergies to tackle this global health problem.