Kathleen attended SVP 2019, the 79th Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in her Brisbane hometown (Australia). She presented a poster on using cribiform plate as a proxy to characterize the olfactory capacities of myrmecophagous mammals based on 3D CT-scans obtained during her Master project in the ConvergeAnt team. Reference: Garland K.*, Hautier L., Ferreira-Cardoso S., Wright M., Martinez Q., Fabre P.-H., Lebrun R. & Delsuc F. (2019). Exploring the olfactory

Rémi and Frédéric attended SMBE 2019, the annual meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution in Manchester (UK). Rémi presented a poster describing our MitoFinder bioinformatic pipeline designed to automatically extract mitogenomic signal from NGS sequencing data. The corresponding preprint is available from bioRxiv (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/685412v1) and the MitoFinder program can be downloaded from GitHub (https://github.com/RemiAllio/MitoFinde

Rémi and Frédéric attended ALPHY 2019, an annual meeting organized in France since 1995, dedicated to the field of Bioinformatics and Comparative Genomics in Paris (France). Rémi gave a talk presenting the results on building bioinformatic pipeline to extract mitogenomic signal from DNA capture sequence data. This tool will be useful for our metabarcoding studies aimed at assessing the the diet of ant-eating mammals in South Africa and French Guiana. Allio R.*, Romiguier J.,

Frédéric and Rémi attended the the 9th Annual Oppenheimer De Beers Research Conference in Johannesburg (South Africa). Frédéric gave a talk presenting the results of building a reference mitogenome database of termites and ants from the Tswalu Kalahari and Tussen die Riviere reserves. Rémi presented a poster on mitochondrial divergence through biogeographical disjunction in three species of African carnivores. These studies are conducted in collaboration with Nico Avenant of

Members of the ConvergeAnt project participated to Evolution 2018, the 2nd Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology held in this year in our home town of Montpellier, France, on August 19-22, with a total of five accepted communication abstracts. Kathleen, Mark, Rémi, and Sérgio acted as volunteers and Frédéric was part of both the Scientific and the local Organizing Committees of what was the biggest congress in Evolutionary Biology ever organized with more than 2600 attendees

Frédéric and Rachid presented a poster showing preliminar results on developing a metagenomic approach to characterize the diet of South African ant-eating mammals at the 8th Annual Oppenheimer De Beers Research Conference in Johannesburg (South Africa). This work is a collaboration with Nico Avenant of the National Museum of Bloemfontein and Nora Weyer, Wendy Panaino and Andrea Fuller of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. #Conference #Microbiome #SouthAfric