Madison, Wisconsin, a place known for its superb selection of craft beverages, for having Wisconsin’s Best Cheese Curds, and, most importantly, for hosting the 2022 annual international conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB). Fortunately, we (Lewis and Tobias) got to attend this year’s ISMB and get a taste of Madison. The 2022 conference is the 30th ISMB conference and has grown to become the world’s largest bioinformatics/computational biology conference with nearly 600 presented talks. We therefore got to hear a wide range of different and interesting talks.

The conference consists of a number of different tracks run over four days. The Communities of Special Interest (COSI) track that was the most relevant for our group was “3DSIG: Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Biophysics”. Other COSIs like “Function: Gene and Protein Function Annotation” and “MLCSB: Machine Learning in Computational and Systems Biology”, had some relevant talks, however, the majority of these talks revolved around omics. While 3DSIG mainly had talks about proteins in general, it also had a few antibody or TCR related talks. This track was therefore good for getting a feeling of the current research on protein structure and function, but also provided some cool talks about the most awesome Y-shaped thing in the world.

For the interested; next year’s ISMB will be in Lyon, France. Known as the tasteful part of France, you will get to try tasty food along with the tasty research!