Hi there!

Hope you've been enjoying #bps2022 as much as I have! My Saturday digest went live Sunday and I know a few of you read it, so thanks! But here I am Monday night and my Sunday summary is no where to be found. What happened? Well, a lot!

My Sunday was another jam-packed day of sessions. I started the morning zigging and zagging between sessions, and ended up in the "New and Notable" session. There were, as expected, some good talks in the queue, but for me the highlight was Stephan Pless from the University of Copenhagen who was talking about the NALCN sodium leak channel. Not only is the structure visibly stunning, but the story behind the science had it all: mystery, intrigue, and even a sneaky calmodulin that co-purified during their purification and showed up in their structure. Layer that on top of an extremely polished talk & slide deck, and you check all the boxes for me.

After the session, I ended up moseying down to the exhibit hall to chat with some vendors and look at the posters. OH MY GOD THERE ARE SO MANY POSTERS. For those of you who know me, which I assume is not many, I tend to enjoy approaching a poster session with an air of nonchalance. I may have some abstracts I noted to check out, but with posters sometimes you need to just see it in the moment and go where your curiosity takes you. Turns out that doesn't work particularly well with >500 posters and a 2 hour window. I am sad to have not had more time to talk with certain people and hear about their work; fortunately there are more poster sessions, so if I plan better maybe I will figure out a better system (spoiler: I wasn't any better today [Monday], oops.).

At some point during my darting around in the exhibit hall I realized that some sessions were starting up again, so I went upstairs to check out the talks on translation which included a number of talks on single-molecule FRET. I even got to finally meet in-person someone (Korak Ray a grad student at Columbia) who has given hours of his time to help me with my work by sharing software and analysis advice all over Zoom. I'm willing to be there are hundreds of these stories at BPS2022. Connections made virtually during the pandemic that culminate in finally meeting in person after "knowing" one another for years. It makes me think of the days when people corresponded with pen-pals; you'd write letters but the person remained out of reach with many things about them a mystery. I think meeting someone after only previously corresponding through email and Zoom can feel awkward, after all, how much do you really know the person you saw on your screen a few times? What if it wasn't their computer lagging every 10 seconds and they actually freeze in real life?! Okay, probably not that. But I found myself wondering: what level of comfort do you have with someone you've not "met", yet you've talked to many times?With all of this running through my head I duck into the second row of the session, scan the people with laptops in front, and spot a familiar silhouette. Ten seconds later, I tap him on the shoulder and without missing a beat he turns around to offer a fist-bump. Just like that, a meeting in person that was 16 months in the making dissolves into familiarity. He gave a great talk, by the way, though it's not germane to my story. I hope some of you got to have a long-time in the making in person meeting, too. Though Zoom gave us a medium to chat when we couldn't meet in person, there was no substitute for the personal connections that happen over coffee, or dinner. It feels really good to be back.

Thanks for reading, John