Biophysical Society Bulletin | September 2023

Thematic Meeting

Towards a More Perfect Union: Multi-Scale Models of Muscle and Their Experimental Validation Canterbury, UK, July 17–20, 2023

Attendees from Europe, North America, and Asia met at the University of Kent in Canterbury, United Kingdom to present their research and discuss ways for experimentalists and computational modelers to work more closely together. The meeting included 88 scientists, clinicians, and trainees interested in cardiac and skeletal muscle structure and function, how these are altered in disease, and how this information can be used to develop novel approaches to treat diseases. Each day featured a keynote speaker, whose talk introduced the subjects for talks of the day, and each session had multiple invited speakers and one selected by an ear ly-stage investigator committee from the abstracts submit ted for the meeting. There were also two panel discussions

to stimulate further discussion of ways to combine computa tional models and experimentation to gain new insights into muscle. Attendees agreed that the meeting was timely, given recent advances in experimental technologies and computa tional tools. For example, new high-resolution structures of sarcomere thin and thick proteins were reported alongside protein molecular dynamics models based on the structur al data. These new higher-resolution models were used to predict the mechanisms of therapeutic small molecules. Another theme was focused on the integration of new, struc ture-based computational models of muscle over multiple scales and experiments designed to validate these models.

September 2023

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