Returning from ISMB25

Last Friday the ISMB25 in Liverpool wrapped up like it had started, with one of the Chemistry Nobel laureates 2024 speaking. On the first day, John Jumper had given a talk on AlphaFold, on the last day David Baker told the attendees from his home in Seattle over video how to get things done - don’t travel.

When asked about their favorite part of the conference, Beatriz, Ivan, and Bernhard answered:

Beatriz: With over two thousand participants, the ISMB/ECCB 2025 conference was definitely a showcase of all the current trends in the bioinformatics world. My favorite part of attending these large events is the ability to talk and interact with so many people from different fields. To see the current advances in so many fields. The perfect opportunity to develop your ideas and to also think about your own projects.

Ivan: A big conference means a large and wide sample of scientific topics. It was an opportunity to expose myself to the trends of contemporary bioinformatics and get some broad context for our group’s research. Of course, 80% of presentations were about AI and machine learning, but aside from that, I heard a lot of interesing and thought-provoking talks concerning community efforts in healthcare and research. I was also eagerly looking forward to hearing about antigen and antibody design and was not disappointed. Finally, I’d like to note positively the format of the poster sessions: at long last I’ve seen a conference where the same posters were around for 2 days, not 2 hours. This allowed me to see everything at my own pace.

Bernhard: There were so many great talks and illuminating moments, it’s hard for me to pick a particular one. But if I have to, it was when one of the speakers mentioned in an aside the WHO bacterial priority pathogens list. We’d been looking for an up to date list of microbes to concentrate our marker discovery efforts on - and there it was, right in front of our eyes.