Meeting reports

This year saw the inaugural Alternative Nucleic Acid Topology (AlterNAT) conference, which was kindly sponsored and supported by the Biochemical Society. Held at the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Burlington House, the event attracted some of the top names in nucleic acids research, with a particular focus on non-canonical alternative DNA and RNA structures.Watson and Crick first described the sequence and structural features of double-helical DNA nearly 60 years ago. Since then, a variety of alternative nucleic acid conformations have been shown to form through either the folding of a single strand or the association of three, four, or many strands of nucleic acids.Talks and posters throughout the day spanned a range of topics, including understanding the role of triplex and quadruplex structures in regulation of gene expression and links to cancer and other genetic disorders, development of molecular modelling and machine learning tools for understanding the role of such structures, and engineering of multistranded complexes for self-assembly of nanoscale objects, lattices, and devices from synthetic oligonucleotides (DNA origami). Our guest speakers (Prof. Yiliang Ding from the John Innes Centre, UK; Prof. Kurt Gothelf from Aarhus University, Denmark; Prof. Stefan Howorka from UCL, UK) provided insightful and inspirational talks on the exciting possibilities within the field.Whilst our understanding of the roles and applications of these molecules has improved in recent years, there is still much to discover. This meeting brought together researchers within the fields of biochemistry, genome biology, biotechnology, biophysics, and molecular biology with a specific interest in the study of multistranded nucleic structures. This was an incredibly valuable event, enabling discussion of the current state of the art, development of novel ideas and research collaborations, and sharing of ideas to help further develop the field towards addressing some of the most important questions in biology today.We look forward to running the event again in 2026 to see how this fast-moving field has advanced.