Nematology Meeting of the Americas, Conference Review
By Summer Xue, Bringham Young University
City of Montreal. Photo credit S. Xue
Day 1
The 2016 Society of Nematologists/Organization of Nematologists of Tropical America conference was held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. I arrived in Montreal the morning before the meeting and had a free day to see the beautiful city. There are some really cool architectures in Montreal, and one is located near the bus station.
Day 2
The conference began with registration and an opening reception. All conference participants got a cool T-shirt and a small package. Honestly, the number of participants was more than I thought, and there were some brilliant scientists with a passion for nematodes I was really happy to meet!
Oral presentation at SoN/ONTA. Photo credit S. Xue
Day 3-4
I was so excited to be around fantastic scientists and couldn’t wait to find more idea about my own research from the speakers and posters! Society of Nematologists Dr. Byron Adams opened the meeting with words of welcome. The plenary talks featured nematology VIPs such as Dr. Diana Wall, Dr. Graham Stirling, Dr. Sara Sánchez-Moreno, and Dr. Howard Ferris! There were many topics presented in the oral and poster sessions. This is a general conference, so you always can find topics related to your study and most of them were great! I was excited about a lecture about genetic variability and phylogenetic analysis of nematodes, particularly the methods or strategies they applied to their data.
I gave my poster presentation on Monday. To my surprise, there were many people interested in the Antarctica nematodes, and I got some really good comments on my genome study and experimental design. Some students shared their experiences about how to deal with the shorter sequence scaffolds in genomic work, which is super useful to me!
Day 4
This was a tour day, we went to different farms in Montreal and it was my first time to see bee hives this close. We saw little environmental chambers that integrated plant crop production with aquaculture. They keep and feed fish in the bottom tank and use the fish by-products to grow crops on the top.
We ended the day with a river cruise was awesome because of perfect views and food!
