Biocurious

/ a biophysics blog

Biophysical Discussions 2006, Molecular Motors: Point Counterpoint

Posted 12 December 2006 by Andre under

The talks and the pre-meeting study books are available for this year’s Biophysical Discussions series called Molecular Motors: Point Counterpoint.

If you’re interested in molecular motors but didn’t get to this meeting I think you’ll find some useful stuff there. Even if molecular motors aren’t your primary interest, you might still find the first talk by Yale Goldman interesting. He gives an overview of the field and outlines what he thinks are the major outstanding problems. I think that’s great and I would love to see more of it. The leaders in any particular field don’t have a monopoly on good ideas and I’m sure there’s a lot to be gained from not following their advice in some cases, but they are leaders for a reason and it’s important to get their perspective.

My one complaint: they only filmed the speaker’s and not their slides so it’s often difficult to follow the talks if you don’t already know roughly what they’re talking about. Hopefully that will be improved for future meetings.

  

  1. PhilipJ    12 December 06    #

    I second the complaint about the filming… it would actually be more useful to have only filmed the slides if we can only have one or the other.

    Yale gave this talk at the workshop in Japan I attended, and I was amazed with the Myosin VI stuff. That the linking domain isn’t long enough to explain the large step sizes observed really means there is no idea what’s going on with that enzyme.


  2. Doug    13 December 06    #

    This topic is interesting.

    In the context of category theory, it is part of the mechanics spectrum.

    Erica Klarreich reviews ‘swarm’ mechanics studies in ‘The mind of the swarm’ in Science News 25 NOV 2006 v170 p347-349. She discusses the physics of ant, fish and locust swarms which appears to include a torus formation. [Article on web with subscription]


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