BioPhyChrom takes place every two years since 2011. It took place at the Lorentz Center of university of Leiden (Netherlands) in 2011 and 2018, at the university of Birmingham (UK) in 2014 and in the Collège de France in Paris (France) in 2016.

The central goal of the Biology and Physics of the Bacterial Chromosome Conference is to construct an integrated model of chromosome structure and function in the context of the living bacterial cell. This goal can only be realized through a multi-disciplinary approach and close collaboration. In the recent years, collaborations between biologists and physicists have generated several key discoveries in the understanding of prokaryotic chromosome structure. The Biology and Physics of the Bacterial Chromosome Conference was specifically organized to recognize the role of this inter-disciplinary work and foster new collaborations and ideas. The conference was initiated by Remus Dame, Olivier Espéli, David Grainger and Paul Wiggins.

We believe the conferences in Leiden, Birmingham and Paris were an important platform for fostering these collaborations as well as developing new collaborations in in this area in the past five years.  Because of the sanitary crisis the 2020 conference was canceled. We expect this on line version of BioPhyChrom   will help perpetuate this multi-disciplinary work and will promote the formation of new bridges between research on bacterial chromosome structuring, genome expression and subcellular architecture.

Robert Landick,  University of Wisconsin–Madison

Steve Bell,  Indiana University, Bloomington

Jie Xiao, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Zaida Luthey Schulten, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Cees Dekker, TU Delft

Petra Schwille, Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry

Stephanie Weber, McGill University

Houra Merrikh, Vanderbilt University

Sean Murray,  Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology