Biophysical Society Bulletin | March 2020

Publications

The First Issue of The Biophysicist is Published! BPS is excited to launch its new, fully

Know the Editor Meyer Jackson

University of Wisconsin-Madison Editor, Reviews

open access journal, The Biophysi- cist . Aimed at undergraduate, grad- uate, and post-graduate students and trainees, active researchers, and scholars of biophysics teaching and learning, this journal highlights education in biophysics and related disciplines. Please visit www.thebio- physicist.org to read this exciting new journal.

Meyer Jackson

What are you currently working on that excites you? We just worked out a new way to investigate fusion pore dynamics in exocytosis, and hope to use it to figure out how various proteins control the escape of signaling molecules from vesicles as they fuse. We are imaging the electrical ac- tivity in many neurons simultaneously in order to understand how neural circuits process and store information. We are also measuring the diffusion constant of calcium within live nerve terminals versus free calcium concentration to learn how the saturation of calcium-binding proteins alters the dynamics of calcium signals that trigger exocytosis. What has been your most exciting discovery as a biophysicist? I have a bit of nostalgia for a time in the early 1980s when I first set up my own lab. I decided to go after what was then a far-fetched and esoteric question of whether the acetyl- choline receptor opens spontaneously, without any ligand. I wanted to test the then controversial “allosteric hypoth- esis” formulated by Monod , Wyman , and Changeux in 1965. The patch clamp was a new technique then, and I thought it might pick up these events even if they were rare. I would know them if I saw them because they would have the same amplitude as the channel openings produced by acetylcholine. I added some electronics to the then primitive commercial patch clamp amplifier, designed and soldered together a triggering circuit, and wrote an assembly-level program to trigger data acquisition into a PDP 11/23 computer. I saw the spontaneous openings flickering across the computer screen and my program produced a beep each time. Many controls and checks validated the finding. It was an exciting discovery that was conceptually driven by the thermodynamics I had studied as a student. How do you stay on top of all the latest developments in your field? It is hopeless. Every paper I read cites at least ten papers I want to read.

The Biophysicist Volume1, Issue1,2020 www.thebiophysicist.org

Membrane Protein Signaling – Special Issue

A new Special Issue of Biophysical Journal was released on February 25. This collection of 21 articles reports on biophysics of membrane protein signaling, with emphasis on the structure, dynamics and function of channels, transporters, and receptors. The articles cover a range of topics including physiological signaling, mod- el systems, and sensory biology. The issue was co-edited by two experts from the Channels and Transporters

Section of the Editorial Board Vasanthi Jayaraman (University of Texas Health Science Center) and Andrew Plested (Hum- boldt Universität zu Berlin). Read these articles online at https:/www.cell.com/biophysj/home. The Biophysical Journal welcomes new papers in this area.

Explore Biophysical Journal Collections cell.com/biophysj/libraries/collections

FollowBPS Journals on Twitter @BiophysJ and@BiophysicistJ

March 2020

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