A five-course meal symposium on "The Future of Muscle is Now".

Muscles are the source of mechanical force. Muscles enable us to move our arms and legs, speak, pump blood, and digest food. Muscle mechanics has been an important subject in biophysics. Accordingly, it is now possible to explain how mechanical force is produced and assembled at all levels of the hierarchy of the muscle contractile system, that is, from a single protein molecule at the smallest scale, to an assembly of the molecules (sarcomere; a highly ordered bipolar structure mainly composed of actin filaments that are protein polymers of actin monomers, and their counterpart myosin filaments that are of myosin motor proteins), to a myofibril (assembly of sarcomeres connected in series) and muscle cell, and finally, to a tissue. Then, are there no intriguing questions that can be asked regarding biophysics? We have organized a symposium titled “The Future of Muscle is Now” at the 60th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society of Japan, held in September 2022 (Figure 1). In the symposium, we intend to demonstrate that the previously mentioned tragic perspective may be incorrect.