Dr. Shan Hongwei and Zhu Dantong from institute of insect science attended Gordon Research Conference on Animal-Microbe Symbioses during June 21-26, 2015 in Waterville Valley, New Hampshire, USA. This was the first Gordon Research Conference on Animal-Microbe Symbioses.
This GRC was created with the goal of providing a stimulating, interdisciplinary and international forum for understanding the current state of knowledge, discussing the newest research directions, debating key questions, and identifying unresolved issues in the field of beneficial associations between microbes and animals. There were about 150 attenders in the meeting, including scientists in allied fields such as plant symbioses and pathogenic microbiology. This symposium consisted of nine issues: (1) Becoming Small: Genome Reduction in Microbial Symbionts, (2) Insects: The Great Experimenters in Symbiosis, (3) Overlooked Partners: Viruses and Fungi,（4）Hooking up Underwater: Symbiosis in the Sea, (5) Learning from Plant-Microbe Symbioses, (6) Alliance, Cooperation and Conflict, (7) New Approaches in Symbiosis Research, (8) Microbial Effects on Animal Life History Strategies, (9) Close to Home: The Human Microbiota. Dr. Shan Hongwei made a poster titled “Temporal dynamics of symbiont quantity and host fitness after rifampicin treatment in an invasive whitefly’”and Dr. Zhu Dantong made a poster titled “The draft genomes of endosymbionts from the Mediterranean species of the whitefly Bemisia tabaci”.
