ABC 2023

The ABC 2023 conference is a venue to discuss subjects surrounding the sequence-dependent physical properties of DNA, new methods and new models, with a multiscale perspective. From the shorter atomistic scale to more biologically pertinent length scales (mesoscale), i.e. from electrons to nucleosomes.

Top international researchers, ABC members, and collaborators from diverse fields — experimentalists, computational chemists/physicists, and developers of new methods — converge to discuss:

Founded in 2001 during the "Atomistic to Continuum Models for Long Molecules" meeting in Ascona, Switzerland, the Ascona B-DNA Consortium (ABC) brings together molecular-dynamics groups dedicated to setting standards for DNA simulation. Its first two systematic phases (2004–2009) ran 15-ns simulations of ten 15-mer sequences with the parm94 force field and then, with parmbsc0, delivered the first comprehensive study of all 136 unique tetranucleotide combinations.

Over the following decade the consortium pushed timescales into the microsecond range with μABC (2010–2014), driving the development of the parmbsc1 force field, and the miniABC project on 13 sequences refined Calladine–Dickerson rules under varied salt conditions. The current effort, HexABC, brings together 14 institutions to characterise all 2080 unique hexanucleotides over sub-millisecond timescales.

DansLab has been a member of the ABC since 2014, co-organised the latest meeting (Ascona 2023), and is co-organising the next one in Barcelona in 2027.