Introduction: twenty five years of the Gibbs Conference on Biothermodynamics

In 2011, the Gibbs Conference on Biothermodynamics will celebrate its 25th anniversary. Since the inaugural meeting in 1987, it has brought together laboratories that lived, breathed and argued about the molecular logic of macromolecular machines. The participants have a deep commitment to understanding the nature of physico-chemical forces that govern regulation of biological systems, and share a passion for applying linkage theory. The collective goal is to understand how ligand binding, subunit assembly and conformational change drive what we observe as physiological processes such as regulated transport, enzyme cascades, gene regulation, membrane permeability, viral infection, intracellular trafficking and folding of macromolecules. In this special issue, articles by former organizers of the Gibbs Conference showcase the current breadth and depth of the field of biothermodynamics, and how thoroughly it is integrated with the study of macromolecular structures, computational modeling and physiological studies of human health and disease.