Biophysical Society Bulletin | January 2020

Publications

Know the Editor Pablo Iglesias

Biophysical Journal Announces Paper of the Year Award “Site-specific Peptide Probes Detect Buried Water in a Lipid Membrane” has been chosen as the 2019 Biophysical Journal Paper of the Year and corresponding author Carlos R. Baiz , of the University of Texas at Austin, will receive the award.

Johns Hopkins University Editor, Systems Biophysics

Pablo Iglesias

What are you currently working on that excites you? This is a somewhat ironic question because over the last few years, I have spent a lot of time studying excitable systems and their role in regulating cell migration. While excitable systems were originally used to understand the transmission of impulses in neurons, we and others have demonstrated that they also underlie the signaling that drives migration in amoeboid cells. Over the last two or three years, we have made a number of predictions as to what happens when these systems are perturbed, which our collaborators have been able to test and confirm experimentally. That has been pretty exciting. What has been your biggest “aha” moment in science? I’m trained in electrical engineering, control engineering, and information theory in particular. While both of these areas share many of the same mathematical tools, traditional- ly there has been little crossover between them. Control engineering deals with the analysis and design of automatic controllers and provides much of the underlying principles behind today’s autonomous systems. On the other hand, information theory studies the transmission of information. One of my biggest “aha” moments happened when I noticed that one of the fundamental theorems of control, known as Bode’s integral, which provides limits to how much control can be applied to a system, could be explained using mutual information. In doing so, we were able to show a connection between two seemingly disparate branches of electrical engineering. I’ve now been able to use some of these results to study cell signaling systems and that has also been pretty exciting.

Carlos R. Baiz

The article was nominated by Associate Editor Claudia Steinem : “The paper is very exciting as it provides direct evidence that amino acid residues in a peptide called pHILP that are fully inserted into the membrane core (hydrophobic residues) remain hydrated. The thorough study uses a com- bination of isotope-edited 2D IR spectroscopy and spectral modelling based on MD simulations demonstrating that solvation is underrepresented in the current MD simulations. These results contribute to the discussion about how these peptides may facilitate the transport of water into the hydro- phobic core of a membrane.” Biophysical Journal Editor-in-Chief Jane Dyson will present the award during the Award Symposium at the 2020 Annual Meeting. This honor includes a monetary award and a plaque and Dr. Baiz will give a short overview of his paper during the Award Symposium.

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Between January 1, 2019 and November 26, 2019, 2,814 reviews were completed for Biophysical Journal .

January 2020

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