From October 5-10th, Liz Cooney (EMBO PostDoc, within the team) attended the Comparative Genomics of Unicellular Eukaryotes conference as an invited speaker. She presented her work on cyanobacterial symbiosis in Dinophysales in the “Plasticity of species interactions” session, in the company of many other interesting talks by esteemed speakers.

The talk, titled “Exploring the genomic and structural states of cyanobacteria-dinoflagellate symbioses in uncultured Dinophysales”, shared the most recent results of transcriptomic sequencing, FIB-SEM, and confocal imaging for the project, and highlighted the extent to which we can use single-cell isolation to gain holistic insight on microbial eukaryote biology when cultivation remains out of reach.

Beyond the many interesting talks, the conference provided a great opportunity to meet and reconnect with other researchers, exchanging methodological tips stimulating discussion. Several colleagues offered useful perspectives that could aid in the advancement of the Dinophysales project. Liz was also pleased to connect several early-career students working on dinoflagellates to the dinoflagellate seminar series and research support group, DinoSphere.

We warmly welcome EMBO fellowship program and CNRS Biologie for their fundings.