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The second meeting of the Heliconius Genome Consortium will be held on 25-26th March 2010 in St Johns College Cambridge.

Accommodation will be available from Weds 24th until Friday inclusive at no cost, thanks to support from St Johns College.  The meeting will be held in the Old Music Room in St Johns College. For a map of college, see here.

Draft schedule:

Thursday 25th March

  • Morning – Assembly of a reference genome. A brief description of the data collected so far and status of the current assembly. Discussion of priorities for obtaining an improved assembly of the reference genome.
  • Comparative genomics goals. Review of the scientific goals outlined at the previous meeting for genome resequencing and comparative genomics.  Discussion of resequencing data obtained so far (if any) and goals for remaining funds in the initial round of money.
  • Afternoon – Annotation and databasing. Discussion of tools available for genome annotation and databasing.  Assignment of tasks to different research groups.
  • Publication plans. Discuss plans for publication of the genome, and in particular for how further data collection might be focused.

Friday 26th March

  • Morning – Presentations and comments from non-HGC members. Attendees with experience in genomics of other organisms will be invited to briefly introduce their own interests and comment on the project.
  • Afternoon – Future plans. Outline specific plans for grant proposals to take advantage of the preliminary data.
  • Conference Dinner in the Wordsworth Room of St Johns College at 7 for 7:30pm (let me know of vegetarian/dietary requirements)

Homework: Please try to have a look at previous genome papers with a mind to what we want to achieve in ours.  Here is a Zip file with some recent papers to look at.

Attendees (with accommodation)

Mark Blaxter (not friday)
John Davey
Brian Counterman
Richard ffrench-Constant
Paul Wilkinson (veg)
Alexie Papanicolaou
Jim Mallet
Owen McMillan
Marcus Kronforst
Nicola Chamberlain
Bob Reed
Chris Elsik
Stephen Richards
Sean Mullen
Riccardo Papa
Rainer Lehtonen
Mathieu Joron
Lise Frezel
Marian Goldsmith
Durrell Kapan

Attendees (no accommodation)

Kanchon Dahamasapatra
Jamie Walters
Gos Micklem
Adrian Carr
Daniel Lawson
Simon Baxter
Laura Ferguson
Nicola Nadeau
Rob Jones
Richard Merrill
Adam Spargo
Annabel Whibley


Travel
A couple of people have asked me about travel to Cambridge from the US, so I thought I’d send out a general email rather than replying individually. The closest airport is London Stansted but unfortunately not many transatlantic flights go into there. So you are most likely to be looking at a flight to either London Heathrow or London Gatwick. Both of these are a couple of hours travel from Cambridge, either by bus or train. I tend to prefer the bus from Heathrow (this avoids using the London Underground, which can be hectic at busy times), and the train from Gatwick (you should get a ThamesLink train to Kings Cross St Pancras, from where you can change to the train for Cambridge – avoid the Gatwick Express which goes to Victoria station).

See also the University web pages about travel

I have been working with Heliconius butterflies since 1993, when I started my PhD with Jim Mallet in University College London. The original PhD advert is posted here. My original interests were in the ecology of tropical insects, and during my PhD work I studied a hybrid zone in Ecuador between two incipient species (Heliconius himera and H. erato). I did a little bit of population genetics during my PhD using allozyme loci, which now seems like a very antiquated technique. After a brief respite as a conservation biologist in Ecuador, I then continued with a Postdoc position with Jim, during which I worked mainly in Panama. This led us to the discovery that Heliconius melpomene and H. cydno use wing patterns as cues during mating, leading to reproductive isolation - an example of an ecological traits that contributes to assortative mating and a phenomenon that is now commonly termed a 'magic trait'. In collaboration with Owen McMillan I began to work on the genetic basis of wing patterns in about 2001, conducting crossing experiments in Panama with races of H. melpomene. Over the subsequent years this led to the cloning and identification of wing pattern genes such as optix - a large collaborative effort involving many researchers from across the community. Currently my group works on many aspects of Heliconius evolutionary biology, including evolutionary developmental biology of wing patterning, the genetic and behavioural basis for speciation, the sensory ecology of mimicry and analysis of the Heliconius melpomene genome. For more details see my lab homepage.  Recent publications [zotpress author="Jiggins" style="apa" sortby="date" order=desc limit="5"]

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