I came with my poster on Polistes gene expression, and I remember being in awe of the incredible progress honeybee researchers had made. Seirian: As a non-honeybee researcher, I recall being very much a minority at the 2007 meeting. I have attended the past three CSHL meetings and I’ve noticed a pleasant shift in taxonomic diversity recently, especially in this year’s meeting, to reflect the reality of our research community and range of research organisms. The field exploded over the past 15 years with hundreds of researchers around the world working on social insect genomics.
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Sandra: Quickly thereafter, the ant and termite community started sequencing genomes and many more wasp and bee genomes became available currently we are up to 53 bee genomes and nearly 100 ant genomes. But we have made a lot of progress since then that has broadened the taxonomic focus and the questions that we can ask. A lot of those early studies created excitement because they were performed on a social insect for the very first time. Olav: The Western honey bee ( Apis mellifera) was one of very few Metazoan genomes available in 2006 so the focus of the first meeting was justifiably on that one particular species. Sandra: The first iteration of this meeting in 2007 was originally titled “Honey Bee Genomics” to coordinate efforts for the honey bee genome that had just been published in 2006.
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We asked 2021 Meeting Co-organizers Sandra Rehan, Olav Rueppell and Seirian Sumner to talk us through the renaming as it relates to the evolution of their field, as well as the effects the name change may have had on the meeting itself. On the contrary, the number of participants this year more than doubled compared to the last iteration in 2018, and 92% of the 232 registered participants joined the lively meeting discussions on exchanging a whopping 4,462 messages and 113 files via the platform during the meeting’s 3 days!įirst held in 2007, this meeting was called ‘Honey Bee Genomics & Biology Workshop’ until 2015 when it underwent a name change to reflect progress in the wider field of genomics.
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The online format did not deter these scientists from presenting and discussing the latest developments in their field. In March 2021, researchers of the social insect community again convened at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) for the third meeting on Biology & Genomics of Social Insects-albeit virtually due to the covid pandemic.