Participants take a break after an intense discussion session at the meet. © NCBS 
Getting a truly interdisciplinary scientific meeting to work for both sides isn't that different from the challenges of throwing such a party. A meeting with this aim, a workshop on Molecular Motors, Tracks and Transport, was organised in Puduchery this January by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai and the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore.
The workshop, which drew participants from India, USA, Germany and France, was intended to chip away at the barriers inhibiting biologists, physicists, engineers and applied mathematicians from talking to each other. A central objective was to motivate physicists to confront biological data and biologists to appreciate theoretical approaches.
Studies in molecular motors and intracellular transport lie at the intersection of various fields. Indeed, few other fields of biology intersect as closely with physics and engineering. Such studies require combining an understanding of basic mechanics at the molecular level — the motor is essentially a protein molecule which can move carrying cargo — with a host of exciting experiments, ranging from single molecule biophysics and biochemical experiments to in vivo biology.
To the theoretically inclined, the field is rich both in data and in problems requiring modeling, while the experimentalist is confronted with the challenge of refining the accuracy of data measured in the wet and perpetually noisy environment of the cell, a problem common to many fields.
The payoffs
A few basic ingredients went into making the workshop a success and these hold useful lessons. The payoffs which came from interacting with each other were clear to participants from both sides from the outset.
Biologists brought data and powerful intuition relating to the systems they were studying while physicists and engineers brought the ability to build quantitative models, analyse data in new ways and to develop new experimental techniques.
Also, the meeting was of an intermediate size, with 55 participants in all, and was held over a 6-day period, allowing for long talks, considerable discussion time and personal interactions. Indeed, the atmosphere often resembled an extended lab meeting rather than a more formal workshop.
Students and other junior participants began to prepare long before the meeting began, since they were required to discuss and report on a variety of pre-assigned readings of current literature, mentored by faculty members and senior participants. These very vigorous sessions challenged those attending to take a definite and sometimes contrary point of view, clarifying what could be reasonably justified given the data as against hypotheses which lacked rigorous support.
The middle path
Bridging the gap between large conferences and small meetings and workshops is important for a variety of reasons. Young researchers are often overawed by the sheer scale of large international conferences, while too small meetings might often lack sufficient intellectual depth and variety to enable successful seeding of ideas and approaches.
Given the relatively small size of the motor community in India, this workshop occupied a middle ground, giving students the chance to interact one-on-one with scientists whose papers they had read, studied or attempted to replicate, as well as giving more senior scientists the opportunity to present a body of work from a group or laboratory in a more informal and discussion-oriented session, without the time-pressure and varied focus of a larger conference.
The impact of the meeting was felt in the feedback which the organisers received, suggesting that a template based on the ingredients described above might be useful for interdisciplinary meetings in other fields.
The authors Gautam I. Menon from IMSc, Chennai and Sandhya Koushika from NCBS, Bangalore were among the organisers of the meeting.
