This year GENECO’s winter meeting 2020 were held in a new place, Magle Concert Hall, the old Salvation Army Church behind Folkets hus in Lund. Around 40 participants gathered to attend the meeting.
When we arrived, Christina Rengefors, who had arranged the meeting, provided us with a brand-new water bottle. Thank you, this will come in handy.
After we had some coffee and sandwiches, the meeting started with a welcome talk by Bengt Hansson and Emily O’Connor.
When the practicalities were over, the PhD students David Stuart, Katja Kozjek, Alexander Hegg and Tony Rinaud gave a presentation each of their research. I am impressed by Tony who gave his talk with very short notice instead of Gróa Valgerdur Ingimundardottir, who unfortunately could not attend.
After a nice lunch, Veronica Sobrado and Christian Tellgren-Roth from The National Genomics Infrastructure (NGI) and SciLife talked about what you can get help with from these infrastructure facilities.
Then there was time for the most fascinating talk this day. Per Stenberg, from Umeå University, told us about airborne biodiversity. He and his colleagues have sequenced dna from glass fibre filters originally used for measuring radioactivity by the military. There are one filter sample from every week from the 50’s until today from around ten different places in Sweden. This is a great way to measure biodiversity over time.
The last lecturer was Ramiro Logares, from University of Barcelona, who gave his first talk in Lund since his PhD defence.
During the day everyone could write down questions at a flipchart. These questions were then answered and discussed by a panel consisted of Karin Rengefors, Ramiro Logares, Per Stenberg and Dag Ahrén. There were some great discussions between the panel and the audience.
As usual Torbjörn Säll ended the day with a little historical talk about genetics. Then we all went for dinner at Kulturen Restaurang & Konferens.
Thank you GENECO, all lecturers and especially Christina Rengefors who made this interesting and nice day possible!
You find more photos from this meeting at Flickr.
Text & photo: Inger Ekström
