Second international conference on F-BAR proteins

Architectural beauty attracts many travelers to Europe. The participants of this conference were also attracted by architectural beauty, however the focus in our case was on the architectural beauty of the living cell. The living cell is not only an architectural masterpiece, but possesses fluidity and dynamism even the most gifted artisans would have found impossible to represent in stone. The architectural beauty of the living cell is created by a complex interplay between lipid bilayer membranes and the proteins that lie underneath them at the cortex. The architecture of the living cell is extraordinarily responsive to changes that occur within cells (intrinsic events) and in the extracellular environment (extrinsic events). Complex and interwoven signaling pathways link the intrinsic and extrinsic events to changes in cell shape and behavior and those that have been identified and studied probably represent only a minority. What has become apparent, however, is the central and unique role of a group of phospholipid-binding and signaling proteins in these various pathways: the BAR, F-BAR and I-BAR domain proteins.