Biophysical Reviews’ national biophysical society partnership program

Abstract

This Special Issue is focused on the Biophysical Society of Japan. It represents the first in a series tasked with introducing an individual national biophysical society to the wider biophysical community. In this Editorial for Volume 12 Issue 2, I first outline the nature and goals of this program before going on to describe the contents of the Special Issue that relate to the activities organized by the Biophysical Society of Japan and the scope of the research performed by its members.

Effects of surfaces and macromolecular crowding on bimolecular reaction rates

“…This macromolecular crowding affects intracellular dynamics in several ways (see reviews [2,3,4,5,6]). It slows diffusion by about a factor of 5 to 10 [7,8], it increases association reaction rate constants by an order of magnitude or more [9], it favors folded protein conformations over unfolded ones [5], and it enhances the activity of chaperones [3,10]. Most theoretical explorations of these effects have focused on thermodynamic considerations, including particularly the reduced translational and configurational entropies of molecules that are in crowded systems [11,12].…”

Biophysical reviews—providing an effective critique

“…The next two articles (Cranfield et al 2021;Solís et al 2021) are announcement type Commentaries that respectively describe calls for contributions to an upcoming Special Issue on the Australian Society for Biophysics (ASB) and an Issue Focus on the Costa Rican Biophysical Society. The ASB Special Issue (Cranfield et al 2021) is scheduled for 2022 and represents the journal's next effort in the continuing national biophysical society partnership program series-a program meant to bring to international prominence the workings and research focus of a particular nation's biophysical society (Hall 2020b;Komatsuzaki et al 2020). The Commentary on the Costa Rican Biophysical Society [Solís et al 2021] describes the journal's first attempt at the production of an "Issue Focus"-a mini contiguous Special Issue contained within a Fig.…”

Biophysical Reviews—Quantitative analysis of biological phenomenon

“…Aside from discussing the plasticity of the IgG recognition event, the authors also review the roles of specific carbohydrate modification of the IgG as well as describing the under-appreciated effects of higher-order oligomerization of the IgG post epitope recognition (Yanaka et al 2020). Although functioning as a stand-alone Review, this piece was a late addition to the Special Issue dedicated to the Biophysical Society of Japan and we encourage the reader to appreciate its contribution in relation to that Issue (Komatsuzaki et al 2020;Hall 2020a).…”