Many Highlights and Successes for Bally Lab at Physical Virology GRS/GRC
After the UCMR day the time had finally come for one of the most important conferences for our lab: The Gordon Research Conference (GRC) and seminar (GRS) on Physical Virology. Usually, it is held every other year but due to the Covid-19 pandemic the last GRC on this topic was 4 years ago. This time it was held in the beautiful surroundings of Lucca in Tuscany, Italy. As this is right up our alley, most of the lab joined: Marta, Hudson, Lifeng, Fouzia, Dario, Kerstin and Konrad all could go, present their research, refresh and expand their networks and hear about the most recent advances in physical virology.
Gordon Research Seminars, which occur prior to their associated GRC, are meant for junior researchers of the field. The chairs of this year’s Physical Virology GRS, Ekaterina Selivanovitch (Cornell University, USA) and Edgar A. Hodge (University of Washington, USA), put together a compelling program with talks from PhD students and Postdocs. From our group, Dario gave an excellent talk on “The Role of Binding Avidity and Membrane Complexity in the Attachment of SARS-CoV-2 Variants” while Fouzia chaired a session on “Viral Assembly and Entry Pathways”. Unfortunately, half of the participants had travel issues which lead to some last minute reorganization of the program and the ad-hoc inclusion of a session of 3 minute elevator pitches, followed by 2 minutes of questions. Fouzia and Kerstin jumped on that opportunity, as both had already given a pitch at the UCMR day and were thus perfectly prepared for the task. The two poster sessions gave the opportunity to discuss the research with peers, offering a warmup for impressing “the big PIs” during the GRC. The GRS ended with a panel discussion on “Where can your degree take you?”, chaired by Kerstin from our group and Nicolas Moreno (BCAM, Spain).
The GRS was followed immediately by the GRC, that started the very same evening. The conference itself had a very good attendance. The chairs, Charlotte Uetrecht (CSSB, Germany) and Michael Hagan (Brandeis University, USA), were also satisfied with 44% of female attendees and 50% of female presenters. Participants came from different universities and countries only a lack for African representatives was pointed out. The following days were full of inspiring and excellent talks. Of course, the research included a variety of methods – from molecular dynamics simulations and cryo-electron microscopy to molecular design spanning many virus families. Refreshingly, projects that had made it into clinical trials were also presented; a phase that many researchers in physical virology never experience first-hand.
At the session “Principles that Govern Virus Assembly and Disassembly” Marta presented our group. She focused on the works published recently by Yara and Lifeng in a presentation entitled “Herpesvirus Diffusion at the Cell Surface: From Cell-surface Mimics to Live Cell Microscopy”. Besides the talks there were ample possibilities to network, exchange ideas, and mingle. Every day included 1,5 hours of poster session with 129 posters in total. With such an abundance of unique and exciting research projects many took the opportunity to discuss posters also after dinner. A unique feature of GRCs is that such conferences provide plenty of free time after lunch. During this time, one could hang out with other attendees by joining organized trip to the old city of Lucca or to a vineyard, by visiting the Spa and pool, or by simply taking a hike in the beautiful Tuscan hills.
The last day (Thursday), started with quite some excitement: At the business meeting, Marta ran to be elected as a Vice Chair for the next meeting together with Juan R. Perilla (University of Delaware). Both have attended this GRC several times before and want to contribute to maintaining and expanding the physical virology community. Differences in their backgrounds and research, Juan being mostly oriented towards computational research, allows them to complement each other in organizing the meeting in 2027. They explained that together, they are planning a meeting strongly driven by fundamental biological questions. They also plan to grow the community by exploring new directions within the expanding physical virology field and show how new state-of-the-art methods can contribute to it. While the votes were being counted by the GRC staff, there were other decisions to be made. It was unanimously decided that the next GRC should be preceded by a GRS. With less clearcut results, it was decided that the next meeting will take place in California rather than in Texas; Europe was not considered, since the meeting traditionally alternates between Europe and the USA. In the meantime, the votes were finally counted. The next Vice-Chairs and thus Chairs of the GRC in 4 years are: Marta Bally and Juan Perilla. Big congratulations to Marta!!!
But this wasn’t the last opportunity for our lab to celebrate at the GRC. In the evening after the last session, the winners of the different prizes were announced. We are very happy that Fouzia was awarded a poster prize at the GRS for her work on “Sulfation patterns of heparan sulfate modulate the interactions between human papillomavirus and cell surface glycosaminoglycans”. Kerstin’s short talk on “Characterization of the Physicochemical Properties of Fluorescent Filovirus Pseudotypes” got selected for a prize too.
Overall, the GRS and GRC were a big win for our group. We had a lot of good discussions, especially at our poster sessions, leading to new collaboration ideas. The different works presented at talks and posters were very inspiring and of high quality. We are looking forward to the next edition, where most of our group will for sure show up again.