In March, Max visited the Rocky Mountains of Banff national park to attend the 2024: The Crossroads of Topology, Combinatorics and Biosciences: Deciphering the Entanglement of Multi-Stranded Nucleic Acids workshop
Max giving his presentation on new image analysis methods to characterise DNA Topology
Set within the heart of the Banff national park, this 5-day conference brought together researchers from a range of fields to remove our blinders and open our eyes to the multitude of research attacking the same topological problems from various angles. From hardcore mathematical modellers developing language models to probe the intricacies RNA structures, to the dedicated biologists investigating ion interactions on and computational modellers, this workshop was a great opportunity to merge these fields and push the understanding of DNA topology.
At the workshop, I heard some truly amazing talks surrounding the multitude of DNA structures in various environments, and how this structure can regulate access to the genome, as well as insight into the models and physical laws used to govern them. Standout talks include Lynn Zechiedrich showing negative supercoiling induced DNA-protein interactions occur at a supercoiling threshold, alongside fruitful results surrounding supercoiling induced defects from a past collaboration with Alice. I was also intrigued by Andrew Rechnitzer research into streamlining pivot algorithms to quickly model complex knot and catenated lattice. I also wanted to shout out the superb talk given by Lila Kari where she used machine learning to identify clusters of taxonomic and environmental factors from fragmented DNA sequences of various species.
Group photo of conference attendees
There were many insightful discussions to highlight the biological questions faced by the community such as how does DNA packing affect genome access? It gave a chance for people to spotlight their research which pushed towards this goal, and discussed the ways in which the expertise from these different fields could be utilised to move together towards the biological answers we seek via developing collaborations.
*Most talks should be available on the BIRS website here