My big day has come and now gone – I happily gave my first oral presentation at BPS.  I arrived about 20 minutes before the start and the friendly and competent technician took my computer and resolved a slight issue with recognition of the projector.  I hadn’t seen the chairmen previously in the conference nor been in contact since the last BPS I attended in 2010, so it was nice to say ‘hello.’  I greeted the other speakers and took my seat, attentive as ever with a few more anxious butterflies in my stomach than I anticipated.  As I jotted down notes, I continually glanced over the big bullet points I had already read a hundred times over the past few days.  Finally it was my turn, I was ready.  I knew I could trust my computer since I had run through the presentation half a dozen times the night before.  As I began the intro, bam, the screen freezes, no animation, no movie that I programmed.  Awesome.  I manage to fight off the cloud of panic that momentarily tries to block my mind.  It turns out to be a minor flaw, a quick escape and shift-F5 and I’m up and running with no further glitch.  I’m happy with how the presentation went and had a nice question from the audience.  Then it was over, the first one lined up and knocked down.

Now, there’s no more need to munch down a pretzel-dog before a 3 hour poster presentation.  No more running from room 29 to 20D, across the entire quarter-mile convention center, in the Olympic-time 4 minutes calculated between the start of the questions section and the end of the following.  No more free goodies from vendors, who themselves are busy picking out bright-eyed grad students from well-funded labs.  No more coffee until … the next Starbucks, probably the one conveniently at the airport entrance and next to the security point and again next to the departure gate.  But it will all return again in 11 short months, when we will all again be putting together our presentations and posters that are promising, but not quite what we had hoped when we put together the abstract in October.

See you in Philly!

Saturday Feb 25th started off with some fruit for breakfast at a 7 eleven then bike rentals from Bike Revolution on 6th and Market Ave ($35/night). We rode to the convention center and around the bay then parked at the center. Got my badge which was a streamlined process by scanning the barcode from the email on my phone. However, got bounced back and forth between two lines a couple times in order to buy a guest pass for my wife for the Monday night reception. Overall, it was quick and efficient.

I headed up to Nanoscale Biophysics subgroup and heard talks from Yang Liu and W. E. Moerner. Yang Liu talk was fascinating discussing the advantages of light scattering on target structure resolution. W. E. Moerner talk was also nicely given and how they are able to to use the ABEL trap to confine nanoscale particles/proteins labeled with fluorescent probes. Even though there trap was for very short time scales they were able to look at discrete photobleaching/dissassociation events.

In between these talks I visited the Biological Fluorescence subgroup and heard talks from Christoph Braeuchle and Paul W. Wiseman. Christoph Braeuchle discussed novel smart nano particles for drug delivery. Encapsulation of these nanoparticles in a membrane was essential for delivery and release time of the drug. Paul Wiseman delivered a great talk on advances in FCS for cell imaging by using a k space algorithm for showing discrete elongation and movement along actin filaments as an example.

Afterwards my wife and I headed down Fifth Ave. in order to find something good to eat. I quickly pulled out my phone and browsed to the local recommendations post. First on list cafe Sevilla. We dined outside because the place was packed. It was a chilly evening but they had outside heaters. We ordered a tapas sampler and shrimp brochette, which was grilled shrimp on a skewer. The food was on the high end $$ but very delicious. We trekked up further to Ghiradelli shop and grabbed a Lombard hot chocolate and some ice cream. The hot chocolate was interesting. You received steamed milk with four Ghiradelli truffle chocolates to break up and mix into the steamed milk. Very good! On the patio enjoying our treats we saw Robot man performing and also dog driving a remote control car. Intense. We then saw a man playing a guitar with his feet!

Overall Fifth Ave. is the place to be!

Thanks to all of the students and faculty that presented in the poster session over the last few days, your efforts were much appreciated. Just thought I would mention a great idea to all. Several presenters took down my contact information after talking with them, and then sent me an email afterwards following up. What a great way to keep track of who was interested in the research, and later on send them an email when things don’t work!

Today was one of the better days of the conference for me, which could be due in part to the fact that I only attended a few platforms or symposia. Instead, I took up the opportunity to go to the sessions – you know, those activities that have large descriptions after them in the program. Upon scanning them, I saw the word “undergraduate” and immediately knew that I would have to attend this, since it’s rare that there’s something so specifically aimed at helping baby scientists at a conference full of dinosaurs seasoned scientists.

I sat down at a table that had an overwhelming amount students from BYU (one of them was drinking a Diet Coke, I noticed) and began to make small talk. Small talk led to casual conversation which led way to jokes, and then it was announced that the food was ready. The typical cattle-call scene occurred, and everyone returned to their seats with a plate full of calzones and pizza… strange for a lunch that was advertised as “Breakfast at Noon.” Nonetheless, I was very happy we weren’t eating pancakes.

A man that was obviously older than we yungun’s at the table sat down next to me. As we were introducing where we were from, he scoffed when it came to my turn. The reason was soon made apparent: he graduated from KU, and I am a K-State student. For the majority of you who know nothing about college rivalries, hardly given state-by-state rivalries, the KU-KState rivalry is rather strong. Neither of us were too ardent in our bashing of one another’s schools though, so I decided to figure out if he was from Kansas. Turns out that the stars aligned, or misaligned, again, as he attended Shawnee Mission South, my high school’s rival in Kansas City. After trading the obligatory remarks, we continued on to science.

ONCE AGAIN, a connection between the two of us emerged.  I began to feel bad that everyone else at the table had to hear connection after connection, but, that feeling quickly subsided. He turned out to be a cystic fibrosis researcher, something which I had done a bit of time teaching about and researching about at a small lab in Maine called the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory.

Turns out, he had been courted by that lab for a summer position, and moreover,  knew all of my favorite researchers from that lab as well! Not only did he know them, but he was so close as that he nearly post-doc’ed in one of their labs. It was incredible, and we stayed long after the session talking about his research, his career path, my [projected] career path, and the people that we had in common in our lives.

Just another one of those crazy times in life where a million different things had to go just perfectly right for you to make a connection, but against all odds, 100% of those million different things happened to go just right. May we all be so lucky, and may we all continue to make great connections such as these.

As a microscopist, I’m probably overly biased.  But I think I’m justified in saying that if you are working with fluorescent proteins, you should be obliged to show awesome pictures of how you use these wonderful little light bulbs.  I attended two minisymposium talks on fluorescent proteins that emit light in conjunction with the onset of action potential-driven membrane depolarization.   I was pretty psyched, action potentials are pretty cool in how they work anyways, being the little information highways of our and all animal bodies.  Now they say that there are labels to directly see this stuff – oh yeah, I gotta see this!

So I found a stretch of open seats in the ample 20BC room, whipped out a note pad and anxiously awaited ebbing and flowing fluorescent images to dazzle my retinas.  I won’t put names on it, but sadly I my retinas got all dressed up and had nowhere to go.  In the 30-40 minutes of presentation time there was 1 movie, just one little movie, that was only about 10 seconds long.  Man, what?!  Come on!  As stated in the movie Swingers: “you’re so money and you don’t even know it!”

Granted the studies were about how the proteins work, but at heart we are all still little kids and if you can see a movie that tells the story, that’s way easier to understand and far more enjoyable.  I find that a neat image will stick in my mind far longer than a graph accompanied by all the words that go along to explain it, but that’s a microscopist point of view.  And given the massive number of optics company exhibits, I think there’s quite a few of us.  So if you’re in doubt next time, go ahead and let the colors dance!

Highlights from last night’s Molecular Dynamics platform included Plamen Dobrev’s talk about dynamic protonation of residues in simulation. The cooler way of describing it would be to call it a simulation of phantom hydrogens brought through the fourth dimension. This was followed by my favorite talk of the session by the newly minted Dr. Sarah Rauscher from my lab. She gently (using milliseconds of molecular dynamics sampling) shut the door on about 50 years of proposed models to describe the function of elastin, including the model proposed by Christopher Dobson. Later that night after a fruitful poster session, Lewis Kay and Haw Yang dropped some serious experimental biophysics knowledge on my feeble theorist mind. Both delivered excellent presentations on NMR and FRET respectively but I had to leave that workshop half-way through to fill my belly.

Today, I got wrapped up with Timothy Fenn’s talk on Bayesian modelling of crystal structures. He described a forcefield based approach to quantifying the error in crystal structures due to crystal packing or simply flexibility. This morning’s hot sessions were a bit too sparsely scattered for me so I headed to Chicano Park to take some photographs of the murals, only to be violently rained on.

Again, tons of stylish scientists out in full force today. Thanks to Ibrahim Cisse (Ecole Normale Superieure/CNRS), Jonathan Mitchell (EPFL), Michela Ottolia (UCLA) and the extremely fashionable Thao Nguyen (UCLA), Magnus Andersson (UC Irvine) as well as the frequently-blogged-about Fred Shipley (Amherst College). I apologize for not snapping many pictures of fashionable ladies thus far, but hopefully tomorrow!

I popped into the new member breakfast this morning.  Ok, so I’m not a new member, but I was curious about the reception and wanted to take a glance at the crowd.  Also, I was really intersted to see if members of the Executive Committee or Council of the society would make appearances and make an effort to reach out to people.

I was pleasantly surprised by the result.  The current society president gave a nice ontriduction and as I looked around the room I spotted a few council members chatting with new members and enjoying a nice breakfast.  Below is a picture I took.  The incoming president of the society, caught red-handed hanging out with new members over some breakfast!

One thing I look forward to at the Biophysical Society meeting is the New and Notable session.  This year was no different and I found two of the talks particular interesting given my background (structural biology).  This does not mean the others were not fantastic – they were.  Rather, it’s that like everyone else I have my own biases towards the things I pay attention to.  That said, let me share some of my excitement with you

Carol Robinson (Oxford Univ.) started off with a fantastic set of results showing intact membrane complexes put into the mass spectrometer!  Anyone who pays attention to the study of the structures of membrane complexes is well aware of how difficult investigating these structures can be.  Similarly, it is not really all that common (until Carol came into the picture) to be putting large complexes into a mass spectrometer and obtaining useful results that gave us additional insights into biology.

What Carol showed was V-type ATPases: complexes that have not been crystallized which she and her group then proceeded to stick in the mass spec.  The talk wowed me with one particular slide.  It was a slide showing the intact ATPase from Thermus thermophilus in the mass spec.

What the results she showed did was demonstrate that the use of the mass spec techniques innovated in her laboratory could do was give insights into the mechanism of switching from pumping to synthesis of the ATPases.  I found it a particularly intriguing talk and a very effective communication of the results.

Seok-Yong Lee (Duke Univ.)  showed the x-ray structure of a Concentrative Nucleoside Transporter (CNT) from Vibrio Cholerae.  As a background he described that the CNT is a  membrane bound transporter to get nucleoside into the cell through an ion gradient.  He then gave a good description of just why this was interesting, in that the system has real potential for providing a platform for drug design and delivery.

Next, Seok-Yong dove into showing and describing the 2.4A structure solved in his laboratory that was done in complex with uridine: it is a beautiful trimer structure.

Next, he showed that he was able to determine the stoichiometry after determining the structure.  It was a great explanation of how the structure determination aided in the next determining the next biochemical experiment that they would perform and guiding with insights what to look for.

Similarly, the structure allowed him to identify and annotate the transport domain of the protein, and the nucleoside binding site.  Because CNT uses a sodium gradient, that binding site is important.  The sodium is coordinated by both backbone COO and sidechain positions nearby.  This sodium binding site must be coupled with the ucleoside binding, and as he showed, the two are very close to one another.   The critical residues for the base of the nucleoside are brought together by stabilizing interactions from the sodium being bound into the CNT.  As sodium dissociates, this triggers the dissociation of the nucleoside in the binding site.

All told, it was a fascinating talk and the determination of the structure using crystallography allowed for a nice tale of biochemical experiments that followed from insights gained by solving the structure.  It is no wonder this was selected for the New and Notable!