Some highlights from BPS

Now that it's all over, some notes from BPS as brought back by the denizens of the Block Lab.

• This year, it was decided to hold all the single molecule talks and posters on one day, Tuesday, the penultimate day of the meeting. This was deemed a huge failure. It made it very difficult to see all the posters people were interested in, and it caused cross-scheduling of several talks with overlapping areas of interest. That was the biggest complaint that I heard.
• The Bustamante lab has apparently achieved the 'holy grail' of single molecule motility, by doing real-time measurements of ribosome motility in an optical trap. This has been a goal long sought-after by many labs, and it will be great to see the final published data showing how they did it. The ribosome is incredibly complex, requiring a whole host of proteins just to get it to do anything, so this was quite a feat.
• Lori Goldner's lab presented new data on their system for trapping water beads in a water/fluorocarbon emulsion, allowing them to do smFRET in what amounts to the world's smallest test tube. This stuff sounds really cool, and is proposed as a way to study things that are difficult to study when conjugated to a surface.
• A Japanese group, the Ando lab, apparently presented some stunning new data showing the use of high-speed AFM for visualizing myosin V motion. Their previous work demonstrated up to 30 ms time resolution for a 100x100 pixel region, and they showed motion of myosin V on a mica surface, but it wasn't motility, because there was no actin present. They apparently showed movies at the meeting of actual myosin V walking on actin, in real time, with enough resolution to resolve the stalk, the motor heads, and the actual diffusion of the motor head as it searched for the next binding site! It sounds like amazing work. Their web site has some of their older movies, but I can't wait to see this new work published and see these movies of myoV motility for myself.
• Markus Sauer's lab presented a poster on a new deoxygenation cocktail for SM fluorescescence, with they call "ROXS", for "reducing and oxidizing system". They claim that it is universally useful for all fluorophores, and shows better performance than the current glucose oxidase/catalase systems in use, but I didn't see their data, so I'll have to wait for the publication to see how it stacks up.

Also, I'm curious to know who won the Young Fluorescence Investigator award this year, but I can't find it anywhere online. In the past, the award has kind of been a University of Illinois/Enrico Gratton/Laboratory for Fluorescence Dynamics love fest, but since Enrico moved the LFD to Irvine, I think it's probably been up for grabs.