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ASCB | EMBO Cell Bio 2026

Cell Bio 2026 — An ASCB | EMBO Meeting · San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, CA · December 12 – 15, 2026. The joint annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology and the European Molecular Biology Organization — historically ~6,000 attendees, the largest pure cell-biology venue of the year.

Status: Scaffold — meeting is 7 months out as of today (May 11, 2026). The vault is being seeded now so we can move on the abstract cycle (submission site opened Apr 7, 2026; talk + early-poster deadline Jun 9; late-poster deadline Aug 4). Anything in this vault dated before Cell Bio 2026 is built from the published keynote / symposia slate, Cell Bio 2025 program shape, and ASCB-announced abstract topic categories — flagged inline.

Why this is in the vault

ASCB Cell Bio is the cell-biology basic-science counterpart to the AACR clinical-and-mechanistic axis. Its overlap with the AACR corpus is modest but specific:

  1. Cancer cell biology — explicit ASCB topic category. Signaling, mitosis, autophagy, organelle biology, and cell-cycle work that lands at AACR as "mechanism of disease" sessions originates in labs that present basic findings at ASCB first.
  2. Advanced imaging and tools — ASCB is the bioimaging methods venue, where new microscopy modalities (super-resolution, lattice light-sheet, expansion microscopy, AI segmentation) and image-analysis pipelines (Cellpose, Stardist, napari, ZeroCostDL4Mic, MorphoNet) get their largest cell-biology audience. This is the methods axis that ties to MICCAI (medical imaging methods) and to EuroBioC / GBCC (image-analysis Bioconductor / Python packages).
  3. Organoids and 3D models — ASCB is one of the main venues where stem-cell-derived organoid biology and assembloid work is presented as cell-biology rather than clinical translation. Cross-links to AACR's translational organoid programs.
  4. AI / foundation models for cell biology — emerging track. Virtual-cell, cell-state, and image-foundation-model work is starting to land at ASCB alongside (and sometimes ahead of) AACR.

Hybrid template (and the design decision behind this vault): Cell Bio is neither pure-clinical (ASCO) nor pure-tools (EuroBioC) nor pure-AI (NeurIPS) — it's a basic-biology meeting where the unit of contribution can be either a biological finding (e.g., "this organelle contacts that one to do X") or a tool / method (e.g., "this new microscope / pipeline / cell line resource"). We're running one combined per-talk template in talks/ with an explicit anchor type field (tool vs cell-bio finding) — same schema, different surfaces. This matches the actual structure of the ASCB program where adjacent talks in a minisymposium can be a microscopy method and a mitosis-regulation finding.

What we have / will have to work with

Source Coverage Notes
Cell Bio 2026 site program-at-a-glance, plenary slate, symposia, minisymposia, workshops ascb.org/cellbio2026 — primary
ASCB Newsletter / ASCB Post curated session writeups, pre-meeting features ascb.org/ascb-news
Molecular Biology of the Cell (MBoC) the ASCB-published journal where many Cell Bio talks become papers molbiolcell.org
Image-of-the-Year + Celldance video archive ASCB's visual record; useful as a cross-reference for imaging-methods talks ASCB site
#CellBio2026 (X / Bluesky / Mastodon) real-time session reactions; cell-bio Mastodon presence is substantial community channels
bioRxiv preprint timing many ASCB talks have a bioRxiv preprint posted within ~30 days of the meeting search by speaker
YouTube ASCB channel keynote + select symposium replays (typically posted weeks after the meeting) youtube.com/ASCBtube
Cell Bio virtual platform hybrid registration; session replay for remote attendees ASCB Hubb / Cvent platform

The primary citable record is the abstract supplement indexed alongside MBoC, plus per-talk preprints on bioRxiv. Unlike clinical conferences (SITC's JITC, ASCO Meeting Library), Cell Bio's preprint-mediated citation pattern means a talk's "permanent record" often lives in the speaker's bioRxiv link, not the ASCB-hosted abstract.

Program shape (verified slate + Cell Bio 2025 program shape)

Cell Bio 2026 runs Saturday Dec 12 – Tuesday Dec 15, four days. The structure (per ASCB 2025 / 2026 cadence):

  • Sat Dec 12 (PM): Opening Keynote + welcome reception. Subgroup meetings earlier in the day.
  • Sun Dec 13 – Tue Dec 15: Symposia + minisymposia + workshops + poster halls. Three keynote slots run across the meeting body.
  • Verified keynote speakers (4 total, ASCB announced):
  • Elaine Fuchs, PhD (HHMI / Rockefeller) — Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor; skin / stem-cell biology, niche signaling, cancer initiation.
  • Ramanujan Hegde, PhD (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge) — protein quality control, co-translational folding, ER membrane biology.
  • Liqun Luo, PhD (Stanford / HHMI) — neural-circuit assembly, single-neuron tracing methods, cell-type taxonomy.
  • Elly Tanaka, PhD (IMBA, Austrian Academy of Sciences) — regeneration biology (axolotl), limb / spinal-cord repair, blastema cell-state programming.
  • Symposia speakers (16 named): Yale, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, King's College London, UC San Diego, Washington University, UCLA, ETH Zurich, others — full slate on the Cell Bio 2026 site.
  • Abstract scale: typical Cell Bio meeting runs ~2,500 – 3,500 abstracts across talks + posters, several hundred per minisymposium track, with ~50 minisymposia and ~8 – 12 keynote / symposia slots.
  • Tracks dominating the corpus (per Cell Bio abstract category list):
  • Genome biology — chromatin, transcription, DNA replication / repair, RNA biology
  • Membrane biology and trafficking — ER / Golgi / endosomal, secretion, exocytosis
  • Cytoskeleton and motility — actin, microtubules, intermediate filaments, cell migration
  • Signal transduction — kinase cascades, GPCR, second messengers, mechanotransduction
  • Organelles and cell division — mitosis, meiosis, centrosomes, cytokinesis
  • Cell metabolism and stress response — autophagy, UPR, integrated stress response
  • Cell death and aging — apoptosis, necroptosis, ferroptosis, senescence
  • Disease mechanisms — neurodegeneration, infection, inflammation
  • Developmental and stem cell biology — pluripotency, lineage commitment, organoids
  • Cancer cell biology — the explicit AACR overlap category
  • Immune cell biology — innate / adaptive at the cellular level
  • Plant and evolutionary cell biology — comparative / non-model cell biology
  • Advanced tools and technologies — microscopy, image analysis, genome engineering, reporter systems
  • Systems biology and bioengineering — modeling, synthetic biology, organ-on-chip
  • Science education — pedagogy / DEI track

Organization

conferences/ascb-2026/
├── index.md             # this page
├── program-notes.md     # pre-meeting prep: dates, venue, tracks, expected themes, tool / cell-bio watch list, key dates
└── talks/               # hybrid per-talk template — anchor type: tool OR cell-bio finding
    └── index.md         # template + master talk index table (keynotes, symposia, minisymposia, methods)

Day-by-day digest (digest/day-N-*.md) and cross-day themes (themes.md) deferred until post-meeting, modeled on the JPM 2026 / Nextflow 2026 vaults.

What's different from the rest of the corpus

  • Basic-science, not clinical. No drug readouts, no trials, no FDA-state surface. Cancer cell biology appears as mechanism work, not as therapeutic-class status.
  • Findings + tools in the same per-talk schema. Unlike SITC (trials/ + tools/ split) or EuroBioC (pure tools), Cell Bio mixes biological-finding talks and method-demonstration talks within the same minisymposium. The talks/ template carries an anchor field so the corpus surfaces this directly.
  • bioRxiv-mediated citation. Unlike SITC's JITC DOI per abstract, Cell Bio talks are best cited via the speaker's bioRxiv preprint. Per-talk pages should track the preprint link, not just the abstract.
  • December slot, with limited overlap. Cell Bio runs the same week as ASH (clinical hematology) and the week after SABCS (clinical breast cancer). Anyone attending ASCB is not at ASH — the corpus inherits zero scheduling conflict surface, but does inherit some readership conflict.
  • Hybrid format, smaller virtual surface than clinical meetings. ASCB has run hybrid Cell Bio meetings since 2021 but with less elaborate virtual infrastructure than ASCO / AACR — many minisymposia are in-person only.
  • AACR 2026 — cancer cell biology overlap. Mitosis / autophagy / cell-cycle / signaling work presented at ASCB often reappears at AACR as "mechanism of disease" sessions. Single-cell axis touches both meetings.
  • MICCAI 2026 — bioimaging methods overlap. ASCB advanced-tools track includes super-resolution and AI segmentation; MICCAI is the medical-imaging methods venue. Tool talks at ASCB frequently cite or extend MICCAI-published methods.
  • EuroBioC 2025 — image-analysis tooling overlap. Bioconductor and Python image-analysis packages (Cellpose, napari, Stardist, etc.) appear in both venues; ASCB is where they're demonstrated in cell-biology workflows, EuroBioC is where the R / Bioconductor wrappers are released.
  • CSHL BDS 2026 — overlapping early-November / December date band on biological-data-science methods.
  • Nextflow Summit — pipeline / workflow axis intersects with imaging-pipeline talks at ASCB.
  • Conferences timeline — Cell Bio's position in the year's cycle (AACR Apr → ASCO May/Jun → ESMO Oct → SITC Nov → SABCS Dec → ASH Dec → Cell Bio Dec → JPM Jan).

Next step

  • Now (May – Jun 2026, abstract window open): populate program-notes.md with the expected-theme shortlist and watch list for cancer-cell-biology and bioimaging-tool talks. Pre-build keynote stubs for Fuchs, Hegde, Luo, Tanaka in talks/.
  • Talk + early-poster deadline (Jun 9, 2026): abstract submission closes for symposium / minisymposium consideration.
  • Late-poster deadline (Aug 4, 2026): poster-only abstract close.
  • Program release (~Sep – Oct 2026): when ASCB posts the program-at-a-glance + minisymposium grid, expand talks/ stubs to match the actual session slate.
  • Live meeting (Dec 12 – 15): real-time capture per day. Hybrid platform means selected sessions are available for remote watching; in-person-only minisymposia get covered via social + bioRxiv linkage.
  • Post-meeting (Dec 2026 – Jan 2027): finalize themes.md. Expected threads (speculative, to be revised): organelle contact-site biology maturation, autophagy / lysosomal therapeutic mechanism, AI-foundation-models for cell biology, super-resolution + AI segmentation convergence, organoid / assembloid cell-state programming.

Sources