The Heliconius Genome Consortium has been awarded a BBSRC ‘USA Partnering Award’ worth almost £40k over four years. This will fund meetings to bring the consortium members together for genome annotation and analysis. In addition a number of lab exchange visits for postdocs and students will also be funded. The aim is to promote collaboration and interaction between consortium members – and in particular between the UK and US. We are also keen to collaborate with other labs working on insect genomes who may be interested in being involved in annotation of particular gene families.

We have also applied to NESCENT to fund HGC meetings based at Duke University in North Carolina.