Blog

Fernando Moreno-Herrero, together with Ana G. del Arco, organized “The 3^rd Workshop on Advanced Nanobioscience”, which took place in Madrid, at the National Center of Biotechnology (CNB-CSIC) on 26^th May 2023.

Every year, the Macromolecular Structures Department hosts a one-day workshop focusing on current topics of relevance. For this occasion, several exciting topics were planned for discussion. One of them was mass photometry, featuring a talk by Prof. Philip Kukura (Oxford University), who is the inventor of this methodology. Mass Photometry has gained popularity in labs worldwide as it complements other techniques in determining stoichiometry and protein-protein interactions. Additionally, the workshop included discussions on the latest advances in nanopore biophysics with presentations from some of our esteemed researchers working on this subject in Spain, including Dr. Silvia Hernandez-Ainsa (Univ. Zaragoza), and Dr. David Rodriguez-Larrea (Instituto Biofisika). Furthermore, we invited Dr. Sonja Schmidt (Wageningen University), a young researcher who is establishing her lab in The Netherlands. Time was allocated to provide updates on various topics that the biophysics community in the Madrid area is currently focusing on, such as Optical and Magnetic Tweezers, Atomic Force Microscopy, and other fluorescence-based methods. In this respect we invited Dr. Andra Dumitru (CNIC), also a young researcher aiming to start her own group in the coming future on mechanobiology and AFM. The conference also included talks from other local group leaders (Dr. Borja Ibarra, Dr. Pedro J. de Pablo, Dr. Cristina Flors, and Dr. Salvatore Assenza), and PhD students. We put special care in maintaining an appropriate gender balance when creating the program, resulting in six male speakers and seven female speakers.

We thanks to The Company of Biologists, The Spanish Biophysical Society and Lumicks for their support. The 2023 workshop was a great success with approximately 80 in-person participants (close to the maximum occupancy of the CNB auditorium) and around 15 online participants.