Overview of the bacterial/archaeal supermolecular assembly session at the 21st IUPAB and the 62nd Biophysics Society of Japan joint congress.

In this session, six invited speakers presented their innovative research to investigate the structure and dynamics of bacterial and archaeal supramolecular assembly systems. They explained their research from the perspective of bacterial genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, biophysics, structural biology, cell biology, microscopy imaging, and molecular dynamics simulation. The session started with a section on the mechanism of pilus assembly in cyanobacteria. It then moved on to surface architecture of a nano-sized archaeon, bacterial flagellar protein export and assembly, flagella-driven motility in bacteria and other unique assembly systems. The session highlighted significant accomplishments in the field and also presented a variety of outstanding challenges.