Once every 4 years we meet with the global social insect research community and it’s always the most worthwhile conference imaginable. This time we met in Freiburg, Germany. It was super nice, well organized conference. We met good friends and colleagues (including a great UNIL reunion! @ photo credit: the awesome Adria) and heard about lots of great science, including evolutionary genomics, chemical ecology, behaviour, fascinatingly weird reproductive systems, and much more. 

Our lab was very well represented by Yoann, Felix and Eyal. Yoann talked in the “Mechanisms and evolution of insect sensory systems” sysmposium, where he got the opening 30 minute slot(!) This is virtually unheard of for a PhD student. This allowed him to give an in depth talk on his methodology, the big GAGA OR project (recently published in MBE) and about the even bigger analysis of ORs across Hymenoptera (ongoing collab with the Sumner group). Felix gave a talk on his second paper on the super cool discovery of large-scale genomic rearrangement in one of the two dependent lineages of Pogonomyrmex barbatus (in review for MBE; preprint on biorxiv). And Eyal talked about the social chromosome, obviously. What else?!