How appropriate for the 8th European Biophysics Congress to 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 the European Biophysics Societies Association (EBSA) and the Hungarian Biophysical Society celebrating their 27th and 50th anniversary, respectively.

In the face of such history, BMC Biophysics is a relatively new addition to the field. The journal has recently relaunched from its previous incarnation as PMC Biophysics, and is now a member of the BMC-series journals, with an expanded Editorial Board.

As one of the few dedicated biophysics journals to be entirely open access, this is an exciting time for 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 entire field of biophysics,
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
software articles. As an online publisher we are not 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
catch up with its current outgoing president, and Section Editor for the
journal, Professor Alberto 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 Editors Jörg Langowski and Sanford Leuba), as well as a number of exciting plenary addresses. These included an opening address by Nobel laureate Ada 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