A report of the Spring Meeting held at UEA in Norwich
The 2009 Annual Spring Meeting of the BSPB was held at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. The venue was the brand new INTO building which proved to be a superb venue. The facilities were excellent, the staff incredibly helpful and friendly and the food memorable; the conference dinner was truly magnificent.
For the plenary talk Kristina Hamilton, from the University of Swansea, provided a fascinating insight into current knowledge of protist parasites of protists. She discussed how their importance may well increase with global warming and the subsequent predicted frequency of toxic blooms. She described how some of the parasites are highly host specific and may become potential biological control agents for these toxic blooms. The affect of increasing temperature on parasite infections was also highlighted by Beth Okamura from the NHM in her talk on proliferative kidney disease. Gill Malin from the UEA also showed links between climate change and DMS production in her talk on new insights into the production of DMP and DMSP by marine protists.
Many talks during the meeting detailed new molecular and genetic techniques as tools for studying phylogeny and environmental ecology of microbial eukaryotes. Fiona Henriques and Sara Campbell from the University of the West of Scotland spoke about new techniques which might help in preventing Acanthamoeba infections. David Bass from the NHM outlined how a new technique of 454 sequencing might be used to study ecology and biodiversity. Paul Hunter from the UEA described how molecular epidemiology can be used to study the spread of disease, and specifically how it is used to study differences between strains of one species, in his presentation on molecular epidemiology of Cryptosporidium infections of humans. He also talked about his passion for diarrhoea and summarised the global problems associated with the condition accompanied by lots of clinical detail, including comparing the amount of diarrhoea produced in the world to 15 min of water travelling over the Niagra Falls.
Group photograph of meeting attendees
There were some stunning images presented during talks. Some fluorescent micrographs of trypanosomes in presentations by Wendy Gibson from the University of Bristol and by Kevin Tyler from the UEA were particularly impressive. Barry Leadbeater from the University of Birmingham showed some beautiful images of Choanoflagellates and Alan Warren from the NHM showed a series of fabulous SEM images of peritrich ciliates. Terry Preston from UCL had both videos and SEM images of gregarines and Ed Glücksman from Oxford University entertained us with videos of Panomonas. Tom Cavalier-Smith from Oxford University gave a presidential address where he used a PowerPoint presentation to great effect, helping clarify his great romp through the evolution of his ideas on the deep phylogeny of the protozoa and their relation to other organisms.
The meeting was notable for the wide range of subjects covered, the high quality of the presentations and the quality of the food. It was, as usual, a very informative and enjoyable couple of days.