2010 Biophysical Society

This morning I attended the Membrane Active Peptides platform and I was a little disappointed. I thought all of the talks covered interesting experiments, but some of the work could have been presented in a more coherent manner. The new member coffee had excellent treats and it was nice to meet some of the more established members of the society.

The discussion of lipid rafts and the interaction between ceramide and cholesterol with sphingomyelin in the Membrane Physical Chemistry platform was informative and educational. It gave my some good ideas for experiments in my research project.

We ate lunch at Out The Door (in the Westfield Center), which was excellent as usual. If you like your experience there you should check out the real restaurant in the Ferry Building called Slanted Door, I highly recommend it. (Overall rating 4.5/5).

Here are some more pictures from our adventures:

The afternoon poster sessions are one of the best things about the Biophysical Society meeting.  On Sunday afternoon, Kate presented her poster, which details her results on using our vibrational probe in the animicrobial peptide CM15.  While standing in front of her poster, she talked to several of the real, actual world experts on this sort of thing (see below).  For an undergraduate to have this experience several months before her senior thesis is over can be transformative and invaluable (maybe not so transformative for Kate since she is already a convert, heading to grad school, etc.).  The society facilitates this by scheduling almost nothing besides posters during the early afternoon, and since all of the posters are in one big room, the “family” atmosphere really makes it possible for anyone, undergraduates included, to carry on a high-level scientific conversation with people who really know what they are talking about.

So here are my reasons why the Biophysical Society meeting is a great one for undergraduates:

1. the poster sessions (see above)
2. the size of the meeting: just big enough that there is always more than you know, just small enough that you can actually locate people
3. the interdisciplinarity: no getting stuck in artificial departmental boundaries at this meeting.
4. the posters!
5. the internationality of the meeting (see next post)

Today I went to a number of talks. I began at the symposium on Amyloids in Human Disease. I enjoyed hearing about the different ways that people study this important topic. I particularly liked Charles Glabe’s talk on “Structural Diversity of amyloid Oligomers,” which did a great job of differentiating between amyloids at their different stages (pre-fibrillar oligomers, Fibrillar oligomers, and Fibrils). After a much needed snack break, in which I managed to secure one of the precious annual Avanti t-shirts, I moved onto the Interfacial Protein-Lipid Interactions platform. I only stayed for the first 3 talks, but they were all very interesting. As someone who works with a peptide-membrane system, I know very little about membranes in general, so these talks provided me with some much needed background information.

I made it to the last couple talks in the Physical Chemistry of Proteins and Nucleic Acids, which was nice to hear more about techniques with which I am more familiar. After a good lunch at Luna Azul in the Metreon (I would give it a 3.5/5, and no I did not make the face this time), we spent a significant amount of time getting free stuff the vendors and checking out the posters. It was nice to see such a range of research interests all in one room, but still be able to learn about specific topics if you so desired.

The final platform of the day that I attended was Membrane Structure I. Again, it was nice to hear authorities on the topic of membrane structure talk about their research. The talks by Amirmohamad Keyvanloo, Iris van Uitert, and Liana Silva were particularly informative for the current problems I am trying to solve on my own research project.

Today was the first poster session for our group. I presented my poster “Cyanylated cysteine used to map membrane binding and inter-peptide contacts in a model antimicrobial peptide.” I was positioned near the vendors and had a lot of traffic. The most exciting part of the poster session was getting to meet the one person I wanted to meet – Jimmy Feix. He’s done a bunch of SDSL-EPR experiments with CM15, the same antimicrobial peptide I’m working with. I’ve been testing out if the cyanylated cysteine vibrational probe is sensitive to membrane burial using this peptide. So any results I get about membrane burial I compare to the results reported in the Feix group’s EPR papers. It was great to finally meet Jimmy Feix! I also got to ask him a couple of questions about certain CM15 mutants. I’ve had some solubility issues with a couple of the mutants and he gave me some good advice about which mutants to avoid and which ones would be good for me to try out. I also got excellent  feedback from some other celebrities in the antimicrobial peptide field. I also met Yechiel Shai, who first proposed the “carpet” mechanism of membrane disruption by antimicrobial peptides. So the poster session was definitely helpful for me in terms of continuing my project and getting valuable feedback.

It’s been over two days since we checked in at Hotel Metropolis (named after the 1927 German silent film) and so far I have been to over 25 talks and learned a lot about current research in biophysical chemistry. One of the highlights of the meeting has been the Intrinsically Disordered Proteins Subgroup Symposium. I especially enjoyed the keynote lecture by Brian Chait, who discussed the role of intrinsically disordered proteins in nucleocytoplasmic transport and Andreas Matouschek‘s presentation on the role of disordered tails as part of the proteasome degradation signal. At the symposium, I was also able to meet Sonia Longhi, our collaborator from France, who sends us protein mutants for our experiments.

Today our group woke up early to attend 8:15 talks. Kate and I headed to the Protein Assemblies Platform to hear a variety of talks about large protein complexes. Afterward we attended the Physical Chemistry of Proteins & Nucleic Acids Platform and ate lunch at the food court in Moscone Center. After lunch I split from the group and attended the Emerging Single Molecule Techniques I Platform, which was held in a packed room with people standing in the back and sitting in the aisles. Although I am not too familiar with single molecule biophysical techniques, I was fascinated by the array of techniques used to characterize motor proteins.

Tomorrow I look forward to hearing more great talks, visiting the vendors to grab some more science-related goodies and continuing to explore San Francisco.

Some science here from the late am: saw two very slick new and notable talks. I am most enthusiastic about new techniques with promising futures, and saw two of these today, both of the optical variety. One: Christopher Voigt’s lab has demonstrated a two-color optical method for turning a regulatory network on and off. Combination of very slick molecular biology and optical imaging. Two: Thomas Perkins’ lab has figured out how to do very sensitive AFM-pulling experiments on membrane proteins without the problems of drift and lack of spatial fidelity that have plagues these measurements. the trick is to use a hybrid optical trap/AFM measurement. very nice extension of force-unfolding measurements to multi-domain integral membrane proteins, even with high time resolution. their data are so nice I may have to put this in my pchem class for next year! (Single molecular pulling experiments are a wonderful bridge from statistical mechanics to classical thermodynamics using non-PV variables, and these are very nice data).

these were in a huge room, so no room-denial issues here (but my fellow bloggers have reported some issues elsewhere…)

One would think that, since I am on leave from most of my Haverford responsibilities for this year, I might be able to avoid committee work while on a trip!  Not so.  I just attended the meeting of the Early Careers Committee, which has been ably helmed by Dr. Tharin Blumenschein for the past three years.  This is the committee that brings you, among other things, the workshops on transitions from grad-to-postdoc and postdoc-to-other, and a host of online resources for moving yourself up from “early career” to “old and gray after many years of gainful employment.”  It is a small group of people that work very hard in small spurts and make the “guts” activities of the Society keep moving ahead.

So, to those of you out there at the meeting: you should consider joining a committee and pursuing a Society activity that interests you.  Most of the committee meetings are listed in the program, and without much trouble you can learnwho is on each committee and how you can get yourself volunteered/volunteer for something that promotes some aspect of the biophysical.

Here is where we ate yesterday:
breakfast:
(casey) Herbert’s Mexican, on Powell: no. lots of not good food.
(students) Farmer’s Market @Emabarcadero. lots of thumbs up (see pictures below). not very far from Moscone.

lunch: Mel’s “Drive-In” diner one block from Moscone. We gave the food a 3/5 on their customer survey and were unimpressed (Heather made the face) by their service.

dinner: R&G lounge in Chinatown (Kearny between Clay and Sacramentic). we ate with members of the IPD subgroup, a group of 40. they served us about 3x too much food, and most of it was delicious in unexpected ways; the cod was heavenly. this is a really good place and we recommend it (although it was packed when we arrived at 8pm last night). a little bit of hike; try to avoid the big hill!

Heard most of great self-assembled platform session this morning on biomolecular dynamics in crowded (cellular-like) environments, organized by Margaret Cheung. It was very well-attended, and there was some talk of trying to use the forum as a starting point for a new subgroup (using the IDP subgroup, see below) as an example.

The characterization of much of traditional in vitro biochemistry as “drowning enzymes” was quite striking, and it is clear from many of the examples in this session that even relatively well-characterized systems like nice, globular proteins don’t behave the way you might think, which is not all that surprising but definitely throws a wrench into a lot of “traditional biochemistry”. I am especially interested in what happens to water in these sorts of environments… some ideas popping into my head, going to write them down now.

The BPS meeting is a small-ish large meeting; nowhere near as large as the gargantuan (and very unwieldy) ACS meetings and much, much larger than a single-field meeting. So it fits pretty well into small-to-medium-sized convention centers. Moscone is not small, and so the BPS meeting feels a little bit like it is living in the corners of someone else’s house. It is hard to get from room to room, especially from the 300s to anywhere else; this was not as much the case in Long Beach or the new Boston center, for example. BPS attendees are walled off from most of South Moscone due to the construction of another conference that starts later in the week, and we have to run back and forth through the underground cavern to get from small room to small room.

All of the posters and the exhibitors are all in the same room, so this will provide the same dynamic environment for posters that usually exists at BPS meetings. But aside from that setup, which is a big part of why I like to bring undergraduates here (more about that later), this place is not a great fit for our meeting.