Last week I attended The Neptune Evo Devo Symposium in sunny Lisbon, my home town. This meeting was organized by the students of the Neptune Network, a European project that brings together nine European labs to train the young generation of researchers interested in evo-devo of marine organisms. This five-year project, funded by Marie-Curie, is coming to an end and what better way to celebrate its achievements than a meeting that brought together students and PIs from the network as well as guests from other institutions?

Students and PIs presented on recent developments of their research. We had three days of high-quality science and engaging presentations which covered the full spectrum of evo-devo, from fossils to molecular and neuro focuses. The talks included conceptual new ideas such as Arendt’s new evolutionary concept of cell or Akam’s segmentation clocks in arthropods. We also heard of clever methods such as Domazet-Loso’s phylostratigraphic approach to infer rates of gene birth and death over evolutionary time and Averof’s long-term life imaging of limb regeneration.

If you attended the conference and would like to share some thoughts, feel free to comment below.