The Winter Q-Bio is not like other academic symposium/conferences. The idea of Winter Q-Bio was born among a group of biologists resided in the northeast USA. January to February each year is the coldest time of the year in USA. With spring semester in college generally starts in late January and spring break is more than one month ahead, northeastern researchers often found themselves weary and unproductive during this particular time. Some of them came-up with the idea to take shelter in the south where they can talk science in “RT” (room temperature).  So you can image, the design and structure of the Winter Q-Bio is way more casual than other academic conferences. Formal dressing is rarely seen, and speakers often shown up in sandals and shorts.  This laid-back atmosphere shortens the distance between students and professors; encourages communications between strangers; and promotes exchange of ideas.

Because quantitative biology a rather broad field, touching almost all aspects of the science biology and incorporating chemical/physical/mathematical approaches, the Winter Q-bio share the power of quantification of all scope of biology. From the invited oral presentations, Prof. Kristale Jones Prather from MIT showed how to build glucose metabolite valves without hamper the need for growth of bacteria; Prof. Richard Murray from Caltech presented the design of feedback close loop control based on the wound healing models. From the contributed presentations, Prof. Warren Ruder from Univ. of Pittsburgh introduced his robots that actions by interpreting fluorescent signal from programmable bimolecular network in cells; Prof. Nikit Patel from BU showed how to build circuits using transcriptional factor assembly and how to analyze the oscillation patterns.  In the poster sections, you can find works on synNotch optimization, speed-limiting enzyme discovery, novel high-throughput analysis platform, identification of paracrine networks between macrophage and fibroblast, etc. It has been a wonderful opportunity to absorb new knowledge and I found this trip to be extremely rewarding.

I have presented our recent works on the use of synthetic RNA tools in cells at Winter Q-bio and have received positive feedbacks and some advices for our future research. The Winter Q-bio trip has been an intense but fruitful week. In the end, I’d like to thank everyone working on this project and all members that make this trip came true.