Biophysical Society Newsletter | November 2017

8

2017

BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER

NOVEMBER

Conformational Ensembles from Experimental Data and Computer Simulations Thematic Meeting

Participants at the Berlin Thematic Meeting had the opportunity to network through multiple poster sessions and social functions.

In August, approximately 170 biophysicists, computational chemists, physicists, biochemists, and structural biology researchers gathered in the Harnack House in Berlin, Germany, for this Bio- physical Society Thematic Meeting. The meeting brought together several different scientific disciplines and communities to discuss and present research concerning conformational ensembles of macromolecules. A particular focus of the meeting was how one can use computational methods together with a highly diverse set of in- tegrative structural biology approaches to produce novel insights into complex biological systems. The meeting had sessions that described state-of- the-art methods for experimental characterization of complex and dynamic biomolecular systems, as well as computational methods to study these systems. Several talks presented recently developed Bayesian and maximum entropy-based meth- ods for integrating increasingly accurate physical models of molecules with experimental data, and pros and cons of the different approaches were discussed in an engaging and constructive man- ner. Other sessions highlighted how integrative structural biology methods, in which numerous

sources of experimental data are combined, can be used to study systems where traditional structural biology approaches have difficulties. The meeting also presented state-of-the-art applications of a wide range of methods, often combined, including Bragg and diffuse X-ray diffraction, SAXS/WAXS, NMR, cryo-EM, single-molecule FRET, chemical cross-linking, and others. Finally, a series of talks described how these methods, when combined with computational analyses and simulations, can produce novel insights into dynamic and confor- mationally heterogeneous systems. Excellent poster sessions culminated in the Bio- physical Journal Poster Awards, being presented to two students and two postdocs for their outstand- ing contributions (see October 2017 Newsletter). The meeting organizers Kresten Lindorff-Larsen , University of Copenhagen; Helen Berman , Rutgers University; Andrea Cavalli , Institute for Research in Biomedicine; and Gerhard Hummer , Max Planck Institute for Biophysics, coordinated 25 invited speakers,12 talks selected from submit- ted abstracts, 120 contributed posters, and hosted participants from five continents.