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 at around £43 per night from Weds 24th until Friday inclusive.  The meeting will be held either in St Johns or in the Zoology Department – not decided yet.
Travel and meeting costs will be supported by the BBSRC.

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 …