Symposium “Impacts of Microbiota on Animal and Plant Development” at EED Glasgow 2026
The Symposium “Impacts of Microbiota on Animal and Plant Development” takes place as part of the upcoming European Evolutionary Development Conference, organized by Thomas Bosch (Kiel University) and Tyler Carrier (University of North Carolina, Charlotte) and co-sponsored by the Moore Foundation, CIFAR and the CRC 1182. Thanks to generous sponsors, limited financial support is available for early-career scientists.
- Date: June 9-12 2026
- European Evolutionary Development Conference (EED) in Glasgow, UK
- Registration now open! Registration is through the EED homepage: https://www.evodevoconference26.com/
Description:
Understanding how animals reproduce and develop has remained a central tenet of biology for nearly two centuries. Early studies focused on how eggs divide, cells differentiate, and tissues form three-dimensional structures. These morphological investigations shifted a half-century ago to determine the genomic basis of embryonic and adult body plans, how regulatory networks change over evolutionary time, and how the environment shapes the phenotype. Conceptually integrating embryology, evolution, and ecology has allowed development to be studied in a more natural setting. The last three decades has featured the rise of another discipline within the life sciences: host-microbe symbiosis. The principles of host-microbe symbiosis, however, have been slow to be integrated into the framework of embryology, despite that it has become increasingly difficult to differentiate between the developmental processes that are exclusively performed by the host and those that are performed in concert with a specific microbial symbiont or diverse microbiome. This symposium will feature the diverse ways that microbes are integrated into the reproductive and developmental programs of plants and animals. It will also feature model and non-model systems from across the tree of-life that are derived from both the developmental and symbiosis worlds.
Keynote speakers:
- Charles Copland (Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Germany)
- Rupinder Kaur (University of Illinois Chicago, United States of America)
- John Rawls (Duke University, United States)
- Helen Vuong (University of Minnesota, United States)
