Biophysical Society Bulletin | September 2025

Meetings

Beyond Simple Models: The Consequences of Membrane Complexity in Living Systems

This meeting was originally conceived before the COVID pandemic and was to be held in Cordoba, Argentina, with Luis Bagatolli as a co-organizer. Sadly, our community lost Luis to pancreatic cancer while we waited for the pandemic to pass. The organizing team decided to relocate the meeting to Co penhagen and to include many of Luis’s colleagues as invited speakers in order to celebrate his foundational contributions to membrane biophysics. The speakers and attendees came from all around the world, with several from South America and others from North America, across Europe, India, and Japan. The program included 34 invited talks, 14 contributed talks, and 55 posters. There was also good diversity in terms of career stage, which occasioned many opportunities for “ac cidental mentoring”—those impromptu conversations over coffee or lunch that are so important for sharing the complex ities and nuances of academic research. The meeting organizers, Ilya Levental (University of Virginia), Ed Lyman (University of Delaware), Dimitrios Stamou (Univer sity of Copenhagen), Juan Vanegas (Oregon State University), and Sarah Veatch (University of Michigan), thank all of the par ticipants for creating a vibrant and exciting meeting. They also extend a sincere thanks to the sponsors— Biophysical Journal , Lipotype GmbH, Company of Biologists, FEBS Journal , ACS Publications, and EMBO—and to the University of Copenha gen for providing the venue.

Copenhagen, Denmark, July 7–10, 2025 Over the last fifteen years, lipidomics technologies have re vealed that the collections of lipids in cellular membranes are diverse in their chemistry and tightly regulated. These discov eries have opened many new questions in membrane biology and biophysics. Why do cells choose a particular complement of lipids for a particular membrane? How are the lipid identi ties of different membranes in a eukaryotic cell established and maintained? How do the chemistry and interactions of a complex lipidome conspire to produce the functional biophys ical properties of a membrane? To address these questions, ~120 participants gathered in Copenhagen, Denmark on the campus of the University of Copenhagen for a four-day, in-depth set of presentations and discussions. Because membranes sit at the intersection of chemistry, biophysics, and cell biology, the invited speakers included expertise from across these fields, spanning theory, model membranes, synthetic and minimal cells, and micro bial and eukaryotic cell biology. A particular emphasis of the simulation and modeling aspects supplemented molecular dynamics with cutting-edge continuum methods for under standing membrane mechanics. Another important idea that emerged is that even compositionally “simple” membranes are biophysically complex, with many mysteries remaining.

September 2025

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