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Faruk joined earlier in July the VEE team as a Master student (after a 2-month internship). He will work on exploring competition and fitness among giant viruses. Welcome Faruk!

How often do you get to attend a conference in a castle? This beautiful and unique location made the conference very special. We got to meet a large part of the giant virus community, had great scientific exchanges, started new collaborations, and enjoyed the snow. Thanks to the organisers the conference was a great success!

On September 4 and 5 we attended a conference on Extracellular Vesicles (EVs) at the Medical University of Graz. This conference was a joint meeting of the Austrian, Hungarian, Slovenian en Serbian societies/networks for EVs. Our research group is completely new to the field of EVs and our main goal was to learn as much as possible about methods and novel approaches. PhD student Laura presented a poster on her first approach in understanding the differences between EVs produced by infected versus uninfected cells. We definetly learned a lot and made good connections with the EV community. Currently, most methods target EVs produced by mammalian cells, which unfortunately does not always work for our amoeba cells. So we definitely need to become creative and setup novel protocols for working with our favorite model system.

From left to right: Laura, Lotte, Dani, Anouk.

Happy to present to you the new Virus Ecology and Evolution team at the Division of Microbial Ecology (DOME). We are looking into the many different ways viruses can interact with their environment and how this affects viral evolution.