Very successful EMBO Workshop “The Molecular Life of Diatoms Conference”, Paris, 25-28 June 2013

One of the organisers of this four day workshop at the Collège de France in Paris was the Leader of Micro B3’s Work Package 6: Exploring Ecosystems Biology, Chris Bowler of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the Institut de Biologie de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure.

The high-level EMBO meeting, which due to its popularity accepted more participants than originally planned (approx. 150), was divided into sessions: Cell Biology, Physiology, Nanotechnology & Biotechnology, Oceanography.

The meeting was interdisciplinary and brought together scientists from molecular biology to evolutionary ecology, genomics and population genetics to metagenomics, and climate change to nanotechnologies.

The scientific programme included 19 invited speakers. A further 38 short talks were selected from the submitted abstracts to promote interactions among participants and to allow the younger scientists to present their work. Also a poster session was organized to run throughout the workshop, and a poster competition for young investigators was organized with five prizes, thus covering free conference participation for a limited number of senior PhD students or early post-docs.

During the EurOceans Session on oceanography Chris Bowler presented his talk entitled: “comprehensive biogeographical insights into the complexity of marine diatom communities”. http://events.embo.org/13-diatom/

A special issue on ‘Marine Diatoms’ in the Marine Genomics Journal, will be available soon under: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/marine-genomics/news/call-for-papers-fo...

The Molecular Life of Diatoms Conference will be held every two years, with the 3rd one in Seattle (US) in 2015.