Biophysical Society Bulletin | June 2019

BPSMeetings

Announcing the 2020 Thematic Meetings 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 cellu- lar 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 scien- tists in the studies of the spatial organization of biological functions to discuss current ad- vances, share expertise, and most importantly, define the underlying biophysical principles. This thematic meeting will focus on a diverse set of topics such as intracellular function- al 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-com- mensal organizations.

June 2019

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