One of my favourite conferences is always the international biology of butterflies meeting – the general enthusiasm of butterfly people always makes it a stimulating event, and as it only happens every four years or so, there is plenty of time to recover for the next one. The most recent, and now the 6th time the congress has been held, was in Edmonton, Canada last week.
Evolving wings
The Edmonton meeting was no exception to the rule, and there was a generous helping of Heliconius biology to boot. Much of …

The Second meeting of the Heliconius Genome Consortium from March 25-26th 2010 was an awe inspiring event, from the decadence of St. John’s College to the impressive data on candidate color pattern genes. However, the focus of the meeting was the Heliconius genome, and with data rolling in from all over, there was plenty to discuss. Chris Jiggins and St John’s College were fantastic hosts, and provided everything we needed to stay caffeinated and involved throughout the days.
Over the two days, Heliconius biologists, bioinformaticians, others from sequencing centers and …

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 …

We have just heard that the first data is now available from Baylor for the Heliconius melpomene genome project.  Three full runs of 454, giving approximately 4X coverage of the whole genome.  We will be aligning this against existing genome sequence to assess coverage and quality as soon as we can get hold of it!

This is an article I wrote for the Research Horizons magazine in Cambridge. I thought it might be interesting as a bit of a review of some of the areas of research underway at the moment among members of the consortium.  It was written for a Darwin special issue – hence the quote at the start.
On the wings of a butterfly
Since Darwin’s time, Amazonian butterflies have fascinated evolutionary biologists as examples of evolution in action.
On reading Henry Walter Bates’ 1862 account of his travels in the Amazon, Charles Darwin …

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 …

Congratulations to Jim Mallet on winning the Darwin-Wallace medal of the Linnean Society.  The award is only made every 50 years, which means the rest of us need to wait until 2059 if we want a shot at it.  The medal honours those who have made the most significant contributions to evolutionary biology over the last 50 years.  Thirteen medals were awarded, and the other winners this time around included Bryan Clarke, Joseph Felsenstein, Stephen Jay Gould,  Peter Grant and John Maynard Smith.  All very prestigious.
Another of the winners was …