PAST MEETINGS

A Summary of Past & Related Meetings

P-UK 2026 Autumn Meeting - Introducing Spatial Proteomics for Protists - 3rd - 4th September 2026 at the Natural History Museum, London. More details can be found on our meeting report.
P-UK 2024 Autumn Meeting - Protists in Society - 24th - 25th September 2024, at the Natural History Museum, London. More details here.
P-UK 2022 Autumn Meeting- Recognising the value of core methodologies and their complement to modern techniques in protist research, with a special session recognizing John Dolan - Dec 1st – 2nd at the Natural History Museum, London. For details we provide our meeting report and talks from the Dolan celebration.
P-UK 2022 session Symbiosis - Annual Meeting of the Microbiology Society in Belfast, 7th April. More details here.
P-UK Autumn Meeting 2021 - Celebrating Alan Warren 8th December (online). More details here.
P-UK Spring 2021 session Exploring the Eukaryotic Tree of Life - 28th April during the Annual Conference of the Microbiology Society (online). More details here.
P-UK Winter Meeting 2021: Protist parasites of freshwater microalgae - within the British Phycological Society Annual Conference- 8th January. More details here.
P-UK 2019 Autumn Meeting Microbial Symbiosis - 16th-17th December. London. More details here.
P-UK 2017 Spring Meeting, part of the Microbiology Society Meeting - 3rd-6th April. Edinburgh International Conference Centre Edinburgh. More details here.
P-UK 2016 Spring Meeting 6th-8th April. Bournemouth University, Bournemouth. More details here.
British Section of the Society of Protozoologists 2004 Autumn Meeting - Evolution of Protozoa and
Other Protists 13th September at the Linnean Society, London. More details here.

Details of some meetings are below, with links to others above in the text.

P-UK Autumn meeting 2021: Celebrating Alan Warren

The P-UK autumn meeting took place online on the afternoon of the 8th December 2021.

The day was dedicated to Alan Warren who has served the Protistology-UK community and the Protistology-UK Society for many years. Talks focused on the diversity and biology of ciliates, Alan’s favourite group of protists. The session was closed with an outreach talk from Harriet Jones, presenting some of the children books and games from Paramecium press.

Invited speakers:

Genoveva Esteban and James Weiss: Playing hide and seek with ciliates

Ľubomír Rajter’: Global patterns of ciliate alpha and beta diversity across aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems

Blanca Pérez Uz: Hidden diversity of ciliates in ephemeral pools of granitic outcrops

David Montagnes and Thomas Weisse: Ecology of Planktonic Ciliates in a Changing World: Concepts, Methods and Challenges

Sabine Agatha: Collecting bits and pieces - an integrative study on marine planktonic ciliates

Harriet Jones and Owen Senior: Bringing protistology to a very young audience

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P-UK Spring meeting 2021: Exploring the Eukaryotic Tree of Life

P-UK and the Eukaryotic Division of the MS organized this symposium, taking place during the Microbiology Society's Annual Conference 2021 (online).

In the scope of the new UK initiative “Darwin Tree of Life Project”, which is part of the “Earth BioGenome Project”, this session explored protist and fungi diversity, discussed which branches of the eukaryotic tree of life have been over- or under-estimated based on recent metagenomics data, and which regions have been undersampled to explore and discover potentially new branches of the eukaryotic tree.

Invited speakers:

Neil Hall (Earlham Institute, UK)

Patrick Keeling (UBC, Canada)

Sarah Hu (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, USA)

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P-UK Winter meeting 2021: Protist parasites of freshwater microalgae

This year, P-UK teamed up with the British Phycological Society (BPS) in the delivery of a special session on ‘Protist parasites of freshwater microalgae’.

Parasites are significant components of aquatic ecosystems and play a role in shaping food web structure, facilitating energy transfer, and controlling disease. In freshwater environments, zoosporic fungi (Chytridomycota) and fungi-like organisms (including oomycetes, labyrinthulids, thraustochytrids and phagomyxids) are well known parasites of microalgae. However, far less is known about the other eukaryotic parasites such as filose amoebae (e.g. Vamparellids, Phytomyxids) and alveolates (e.g. Sindinids). This session addressed current knowledge on these protist parasites and stresses the importance of understanding their abundance, evolution and biodiversity to appreciate their role in microalgal population dynamics in freshwater systems.

Invited speakers included Claire Gachon, Sigrid Neuhauser, Aurelie Chambouvet and Sebastian Hess.

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Protistology UK’s Autumn meeting in collaboration with and supported by the Microbiology Society and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

At this 2 half-day event:

Discussed leading-edge research on the evolution, ecology and biology of symbioses that include microbes
Identifed novel perspectives on symbiosis by fostering dialogue between symbioses researchers and scientists/engineers who have not worked on the topic but have novel disciplinary and methodological perspectives to bring to the topic
Considered major unanswered questions of microbial symbiosis research, and formulate strategies to address these questions

Invited including:

Sinead Collins: University of Edinburgh

Jörg Wiedenmann: University of South Hampton

Katherine Helliwell: Marine Biology Association

Michael Brockhurst: University of Sheffield

Have a look at the Abstracts' Booklet and Meeting Outcomes!

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