On 25-27 May 2015, the lab attended the 4th international ‘Quest for Orthologs’ conference held at Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, Spain. The following blog entry is a summary of the experiences had at the conference by Ed Chalstrey, Jan Koch, Clement Train, and Lucas Wittwer, who are interns and master’s students in the Dessimoz lab.

Quest for Orthologs (QfO) is a meeting of groups working on orthology detection and phylogenomic databases, with an aim to improve and standardise orthology predictions. This meeting was part of a series of conferences beginning in 2009, which have successfully brought together a community of researchers with shared goals. These goals included collaboration on benchmarking and the sharing of reference datasets.

As short project students in the group, QfO gave an excellent opportunity for those of us based at UCL to meet some of our colleagues from ETH (in Zurich) and Bayer CropScience (in Ghent) in person for the first time and to make contact with other scientists working in the field of ortholog prediction.

As young scientists, some of the most important questions we face are: Will I be able to explain my project to established scientists and discuss it with them? Will I be able to understand the work of other scientists, even if their research topic falls outside my area of expertise? How can I have new ideas and be inspired to contribute to an area of research I’m new to? For us, most of whom had not attended a conference before, QfO was the perfect place to begin answering these questions.

The conference involved talks from each of the research groups and a poster session for students to display their contributions. Each of the postdocs and PhD students in the Dessimoz lab gave a short talk to introduce their posters, as well as one of us (Clement).

Clement: “The talk and the poster were the great practice for us to increase our communication skills by presenting to an audience composed of experts in related topics. This enabled us to adapt our talks depending of the kind of people we had in front of us and exchange ideas with other people during a constructive conversation. Also, attending talks on the many fields related to our work (orthology) was an amazing experience as interns, both in discovering new things and helping us in our own project with new ideas and other ways of thinking.”

QfO was a great opportunity for us to meet scientists that have worked in the field for many years and from all over the world. We were able to benefit from their experience and the advice they gave us after talking with them about our own research projects, gaining a different perspective to that of our usual supervisors and colleagues. One of the discussions had by Jan with two researchers from Switzerland may even lead to a potential future collaboration; they were interested in DLIGHT, a program that was developed by our group.

As well as discussing our current work, the conference also gave us the chance to think about future work opportunities and network with established scientists. One of the highlights for us was meeting Eugene Koonin and Sergei Mekhedov from the NCBI at the conference dinner. We had an amusing chat (about topics not necessarily related to orthology!) and an enjoyable evening. They even invited us to visit them at the NCBI!

All in all, we greatly benefited from our participation in the QfO conference.