INTERNATIONAL UNION FOR
PURE AND APPLIED BIOPHYSICS

As agreed and discussed with Council prior to the ICSU meeting, IUPAB presented a poster that focussed on IUPAB workshops and taskforces, especially as they related to Africa.  The poster can be viewed here.

Outcomes of the IUPAB presentation: The Secretary-General presented this poster and provided 25 copies as A4 printed sheets. The poster was located just outside the meeting room for African delegates. All copies were taken on the first day of the four day meeting. The content of the poster was discussed with delegates from African countries and organizations, and the laminated poster was presented to Professor Sospeter Muhongo, Regional Director ICSU Office For Africa where it will be displayed at their regional office in Pretoria.

The Secretary-General provided names, titles and email addresses of a number of African contacts requested by Professor Greta Pifat-Mrzljak who will encourage African students to attend the workshop she has organized in Croatia in 2009.  This list of contacts will also be sent to the organizers of other IUPAB-approved Workshops (Sofia Bulgaria, Mumbai India, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) in 2009.

Cooperation between the Scientific Unions in Africa:  The Secretary-General had discussions with the following Union representatives:  (1) Professor de Leon (Union of Mathematical Sciences, UMS) was positive about cooperating on educational aspects of  mathematics in Africa and was supportive of the proposed IUPAB Taskforce on Computational Biophysics; (2) Professor  Jacques-Henry Weil  said that IUBMB has already send a workshop into African and will continue to do so. He expressed an interest in coordinating with other scientific Unions; (3) Professor Bruce McKellar representing IUPAP (Pure & Applied Physics, a very large Union with a significant subsection on biophysics) who agreed we should cooperate in this field and that there was a need to develop educational capacity in Africa. IUPAP is also active in the area of ethical conduct in science so there it may be possible to introduce this into African PhD courses. The Secretary-General will contact other Unions including Biology and Physiology (Professor Ann Sefton, International Union for Physiological Sciences, IUPS).

Actions: The Secretary-General will contact the Regional Office in Africa (ROA), the  Third World Academy of Science (TWAS), and representatives of IUPAP, UMS, IUPS, and IUIS.

The 17th International Biophysics Congress will be held in Beijing at the China National Convention Centre from Saturday, October 29 until Wednesday, November 2, 2011.

Further details of this meeting will posted as soon as they are available.

The 18th International Biophysics Congress will be held in Brisbane, Australia in 2014.

from Jean Garnier

Bioinformatics has become a discipline in itself and is well integrated into Biophysics. This is not because biologists need to digitalized their data and analyze them with computers but because this discipline needs to apply algorithms which come from concept or techniques developed in Physics or in Mathematics or to implement rigorous statistical tools for biological data analysis. These data can be obtained by molecular biological techniques, more exactly biochemical ones but also from physical analysis for macromolecular structure determination with synchroton radiation for instance. Bioinformatics is going also to be involved in the developing field of macromolecular interaction networks in systems biology or in the metagenome projects.
The Inter-Unions Bioinformatics Group had its last follow-up meeting at the CODATA Conference in Beijing (China) on 23-25 October 2006. A round-table on Primary Biological databases attended by about thirty participants followed a session on this subject with Jean Garnier as chairman. This round-table was animated by H. Berman, Protein Data Bank, Rutgers University, USA, C. O’Donovan and G. Cochrane from the European Bioinformatics Institute, Hixton, UK, H. Sugawara from the DNA Data Bank, Japan and Jean Garnier. It underlined the importance of biological databases not only in biology in general but also more specifically in Biophysics.
The membership of IUPAB to CODATA has been renewed at the 17th General Assembly in Long Beach, Feb 4, 2008. From 2002 to 2008 Jean Garnier has been a member of the executive committee of CODATA and he has represented IUPAB at the last 26th General Assembly of CODATA in Kiev, Ukraine on October 9 and 10, 2008 and chaired two sessions: Biomedical data sharing and informatics and Biological and Genetics Data at the 21st International CODATA Conference also in Kiev on October 5-8, 2008. See also the report on CODATA.
The Task Force on Bioinformatics has been renewed at the last General assembly of IUPAB. Since Jean Garnier is not any more member of the IUPAB council, a new member will have to be nominated among the Council members and if possible as Convener of the Task Force.

Biophysical Reviews publishes short and critical reviews from key figures in the field. Authors are encouraged to discuss with the Editor the possibility of contributing a review. Biophysical Reviews covers the entire field of biophysics, generally defined as the science of describing and defining biological phenomenon using the concepts and the techniques of physics. This includes but is not limited by such areas as bioinformatics, biophysical methods and instrumentation, medical biophysics, biosystems, cell biophysics and organisation, macromolecules: dynamics, structures and interactions, and membrane biophysics, channels and transportation.

From the publisher’s description.