It is hard to believe that the meeting is almost over already.  I am about to attend my last set of lectures before leaving at the very end of the conference.  By the time anyone reads this, it will probably be totally over.  It all went by so fast.  Like others, I was quite busy visiting posters and attending seminars.  I got a lot out of today’s poster session, as they must have saved the best for last.  A postdoc in my lab could not attend the meeting, although he had prepared a poster, so I sat in for him.  It was hard because there were so many posters to check out that were going on at the same time.  All of these lectures and presentations have left my brain a little fried and my attention span is almost depleted.  It’s all good, though.  It was a wonderful experience and I hope to reflect on what I saw and apply to my research on a physical and theoretical level.

After the conference, I plan on traveling up the east coast to visit some old friends who moved to the area for a couple of days before returning home.   I look forward to going to next year’s meeting.  I will also see some attendees at other conferences this year, so I look forward to catching up.

At the 2008 Gordon Conference for Single Molecule Approaches to Biology, one of the speakers (unfortunately, I have forgotten who) claimed that Biophysicists are scientists who talk about physics amongst biologists, who talk about biology amongst physicists, and who talk about the weather amongst themselves. This produced a nervous chuckle throughout the room. Interdisciplinary science has numerous strengths, but if I had to choose a weakness, it would be that interdisciplinary areas of study such as biophysics have an even larger range of topics, making it difficult for biophysicists to master all areas of their field of study. Thankfully, this makes collaboration and communication even more crucial, and makes meetings like BPS a fantastic conduit to establish these goals.

One of the main reasons I love BPS, as I mentioned in my last post, is that it enables me to get ideas from scientists who are primarily biologists, or primarily physicists, or primarily something in between or completely out of this range. It is the most interdisciplinary specialized meeting I’ve attended. It seems to me that physicists and biologists approach biophysical problems with very different viewpoints. I recently traveled to Quebec and gave a series of talks on this very project: once to chemists and physicists at Laval University, and then a few days later to cell and cancer biologists at l’Université de Montreal. Same talk, different audiences. When I suggested using my platform for cell imaging by introducing nanoparticles into cells, the physicists wanted to know how much optical interference there would be between the nanoparticle emission and the chemical modifications introduced onto its surface for solubilization. Physicists wanted to know how many of these particles could get stuffed into cells, and into which cellular compartments. Physicists wondered how long these cells could survive (and by survive, I mean how long nanoparticle-injected cells remained motile). Biologists, on the other hand, wondered what protein cascades would be induced by the introduction of nanoparticles through endocytosis. Biologists pointed out that just because a cell remains motile doesn’t mean it is happy to be crammed with foreign nanoparticles. I came away with much good feedback from each of these talks. So for any of you who may be following this blog from the comfort and safety of your home labs, I strongly recommend applying to BPS 2012 in San Diego.

And as for the city of Baltimore, I’ve come to appreciate it for the vibrant, soulful, and friendly city that it really is. As an avid tango dancer, whenever I travel I try to find local tango groups. So last night I found a tango group, Tango Esta Noche, in downtown Baltimore and joined them for a few hours of social dancing. What a friendly tango group, many of the dancers had been dancing for many years or even decades (and it certainly showed on the dance floor). I can’t think of a better way to end my time in Baltimore.

See you all in San Diego!

Apologies for the rather tardy rate of blog posts.  My only feeble excuse is that  with darting in and out of the symposium and platforms, taking in all the interesting posters, catching up with the many scientific acquaintances (and making new ones) etc, very little time seems to be left in the day.  The last four days seem to be a blur; I am hoping it will be a bit more relaxed during today’s truncated day.  The next few days and the weekend might be spent just catching up on sleep!

As such, out of the many interesting talks, couple of highlights of Day 4 were:

–          A platform talk by my friend Stephan Pless from Chris Ahern’s lab. They are using un-natural amino acid mutagenesis to probe some important structure-function questions in various ion channels. By using  these non-natural amino acids, one can introduce much more subtle changes in the protein, e.g instead of a glutamic acid to glutamine, which introduces an additional H-bonding donor atom, one can replace it simply neutral residue (Nha – I forget what the full form is).  In this talk Stephan was looking at the role of acidic residues in the S3 helix of the voltage gated potassium channel. I won’t go into actual details sine they will be hopefully publishing the data soon.

–          Diane Lidke who was this year’s recipient of the Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award gave a very interesting talk on her research on tracking receptors in live-cells with quantum dots. I believe she was amongst the first few people to demonstrate that proteins could be labeled in situ with quantum dots and tracked with fluorescence microscopy. Her recent work with EGF receptors shed some light on the dynamics of dimer formation of these proteins in vivo.

(She actually started with a brief mention of her graduate school work which involved using lanthanide resonance energy transfer to determine conformational changes in myosins. This was personally interesting, since as a graduate student myself I was trying to use the same techniques in a different protein, and I remember checking out Dr. Lidke’s poster at Biophysics and her PNAS paper on this.

One talk I was sad to miss out was Doug Rees’ presentation during the ’25 years of Membrane Protein’ symposium.  This was a last minute arrangement as the original speak could not make it (and I would have then missed Stephan’s talk!). I have heard he is a very entertaining speaker and this was obvious even in the last 5 minutes I was able to catch. Thanks to those who tweeted the best parts of the talk!

Couple of general observations about the meeting this year:

–          I don’t know if it was just a combination my wider interest, quirks of scheduling or just higher quality of science, I found myself many times during the conference wishing to be at two places at the same time. Someone on twitter suggested that if BPS could record and stream these talks, then no one would be missing out in the long run. There might be logistical issues with this, but I do hope the organizing committee at least gives it some consideration.

–          I wasn’t a big fan of the manner in which the poster area was set up this year. It was an almost circular arrangement and slightly confusing. Many of the posters seemed jammed in at the corners, and I feel sorry those who had their board right next to the rest rooms!

Unfortunately, I will be missing a very interesting symposium on mechanosensitive channels this afternoon with a flight to catch. But I am really looking forward to the transporter talks during the first symposium.

 

 

Today is a day of double greetings: Happy mardi gras, and happy international women’s day! Today I shifted my research focus a bit to my second project, which is more on the nanotechnology end of things. This project will eventually require me to successfully introduce foreign nanoparticles into living cells, a process with which I am critically unfamiliar. So I spoke to a few poster-presenters in the ‘Exocytosis and Endocytosis’ poster section in hopes of getting a better understanding of the process as a whole. It seems as though the consensus from that community is to use a hypotonic solution in the endocytic vesicles, or to resort to cellular microinjection. If any of you have alternate suggestions, please let me know!

My favorite session from today was the NIH grant-writing workshop, How (Not) to Write Your NIH Grant Proposal. Even though I am still just a graduate student, I figure it is never too early to start looking into the academic grant-writing process. This panel was great- 5 former NIH panel members who mimicked the process of reviewing a grant proposal using dummy grant applications with varying strengths and weaknesses. It was like being a fly in the room during an actual NIH review

When I first arrived in the room near the start of the workshop, it was standing-room, probably reflecting the stagnating success rates for scientific proposals over the last few years. The first dummy grant application that was “reviewed” was from a prominent and well-established professor who had submitted a poor renewal. The NIH panel detailed some of the weak points of this application, which included

–          Design of experiment had the possibility of leading to false positive results

–          Knowledge gaps in the literature review: The grant author failed to acknowledge one or several other works in the field that might have competing goals.

–          The proposal was poorly organized

–          The aims of the proposal were not addressed by the experimental approaches the PI planned to take

–          There had been a decrease in productivity in the lab over the course of the past few years

–          A need for better preliminary data

Apparently, these flaws are common throughout grant applications that receive poor scores. The next dummy grant review was actually a dummy re-submission from a new PI who had just started her lab. This grant re-submission was categorized as strong. Some of its key points included:

–          The re-submission addressed all potential problems that were brought up by the reviewers in the original grant application

–          The PI generated more preliminary data

–          The proposal was clear and well written

–          The suggested intellectual outcome of the proposal would be beneficial for the field

–          The idea was creative

–          The suggested experiments had the potential to answer the questions addressed in the proposal

Members of the dummy panel also gave brief PowerPoint presentations on the types of NIH grants available, and general grant-writing tips. I found it interesting that it is highly encouraged to explain personal circumstances that have influenced your/ your lab’s productivity, if applicable, in your biographical sketch. I came away with a decent understanding of the review process, and although the process itself is lengthy and can be tedious, I am glad referees go to such lengths to ensure a fair evaluation process. Another good tip was to accurately represent the aims of your project. A common question is “why is this research important and relevant”, which certainly needs to be addressed. But, on occasion, applicants will overemphasize the potential results of their research. For example, I study topoisomerases on a single-molecule level. Type IB topoisomerases are popular anti-cancer drug targets. However, I shouldn’t claim that my optical trapping data will cure cancer- only that a better understanding of the protein function may help in future drug design. If the several-steps-removed end goal of your project is too far-fetched, your proposal may end up being reviewed by the wrong panel.

A big thanks to Ravi Basavappa, Jean Chin, Catherine Lewis, Arnold Revzin, and Donald Schneider for making this panel very informative.

And, for my random picture of the day, here is a quick iPod touch snapshot of one of last night’s performers during the BPS dance.

This is the first large conference that I have ever attended.  My impression of this conference is that it is a series of smaller, but related, conferences and symposia.  I can find so many talks and posters just on my research topic, amyloid protein misfolding and aggregation, in one day at several different rooms.  This has sure kept me busy during my time here, which is a good, as everyone involved is getting their money’s worth.

Some highlights of the conference for me were the two IDP platform sessions.  I got a lot out of these platform sessions for my own research.  My poster session also went well, although the traffic to my poster was uneven at times, with most people coming within the last minute.  I almost forgot my handouts, so I had to walk back to my hotel room in the rain.  I came back in time for my presentation, as well as viewing other posters of interest to me.  I found a collaborator’s poster, who currently has a student visiting my lab back in Omaha while I am here at the conference.

There were many platform sessions, but my favorites dealt with force spectroscopy and prion diseases.  I had discussions with some of the presenters after their talks.

On Monday, I did much of the same as on Sunday, while also attending the career workshops, particularly the graduate student breakfast and the postdoc transition panel.  The career breakfast had someone discuss their experience in industry, which is similar to career panels that I have been to at smaller conferences.  The postdoc transition panel showed me that there are many ways to transition to a postdoctoral position, and that there is no single correct way to do this.  Everyone’s experience was different during the transition, but they gave advice to keep in mind while doing this search.

I stopped by the vendors, and I got my free ACS flash drive.  All you need to do is to stop by their booth and fill out a survey if you have not already.  Last night was also the National Lecture, and this was a great talk because it showed the story of how chaperonins were discovered, and the human element behind this great discovery.  After that, there was the reception and dance.  My group first went to the dance for some desserts and a first round of drinks.  The room was quite crowded, so we went to the other room that had a string trio, and this provided a more intimate atmosphere for socializing.  Nonetheless, the night went by too fast, and at the end we were all dead tired.  I slept in this morning and I am looking over my notes from the past two days.

Will try to post something more detailed later, but a quick update about the highlight of Day 3 (Monday) at the conference, which was the Bioengineering talks in the afternoon. Some really cutting edge work presented by Charles Leiber and Bianxiao Cai on using nanomaterials that integrate into biological cells, both for measurement, as well as for interfacing. Very futuristic – the word cyborg was invoked, and Leiber concluded with how the partition between nano-electronic materials and biological tissue will gradually fade!