How appropriate for the8th European Biophysics Congressto be held in a city like Budapest, the so-called “Queen of the Danube”.
Here is a place unified at the banks of this great river—Buda to west,
Pest to the east—and here is where Biology meets Physics, unified in a
single discipline.

Like the city itself this union is not a new one, with co-hosts theEuropean Biophysics Societies Association (EBSA)and theHungarian Biophysical Societycelebrating their 27th and 50th anniversary, respectively.

In the face of such history,BMC Biophysicsis a relatively new addition to the field. The journalhas recentlyrelaunchedfrom its previous incarnation as PMC Biophysics, and is now a member of theBMC-series journals, with an expandedEditorial Board.

As one of the few dedicated biophysics journals to be entirely open access, this is anexciting timefor the field to embrace open data, and the associated benefits of free and open dissemination of research.

BMC Biophysics will consider all articles across the整个生物物理学领域,
with no restriction on article types. We particularly welcome
submissions with a strong focus on physics, as well as contributions to
the field of computational biophysics, and biophysical methods including
软件的文章。作为一个n online publisher we arenot restricted by page limits, and are happy to handle non-standard figure-types—such as videos—as additional files.

The
EBSA Congress was a wonderful showcase for the breadth of scope that
this field has to offer, and BMC Biophysics was delighted to be able to
赶上目前即将卸任的总统Section Editor for the
journal, ProfessorAlberto Diaspro.
Professor Diaspro was enthused by how the conference has developed
since its inception 16 years ago, and to see the huge developments that
have occurred in the field over this time.

In his opening lecture to the popular “Imaging and Optical Microscopy”
session, he talked at length of the latest advances in super-resolution
nanoscopy, and the “resolution obsession” that drives the field (or
“vive la resolution” as Holger Stark of the Max Planck Institute puts
it). We are delighted to welcome Professor Diaspro to the journal’s
Editorial Board, and look forward to working together as the field
develops further.

Other notable highlights of the congress included sessions on “Neuronal Systems and Optogenetics” and “Nucleic Acid and Chromatin Structure and Function” (jointly hosted by BMC Biophysics Section EditorsJörg LangowskiandSanford Leuba), as well as a number of exciting plenary addresses. These included an opening address by Nobel laureateAda Yonath, who emphasised strongly the need for a greater presence for women researchers across all scientific disciplines.

This
call was appropriately met in the EBSA Prize-winning lecture that
followed, with recipient Kinneret Keren discussing her excellent
research on cell movement. In it, she likened the biophysical problem of
actin dynamics to the equivalent of attempting to fit the world’s
population into a city the size of Budapest, and then expecting them to
self-organise at the speed of 600 km/h. I’m not sure how the Queen of
the Danube would feel about that.

Simon Harold PhD

Executive Editor

BMC Biophysics