From molecules to life: On the origin and function of molecules in chemical ecology
The 2025 Prague meeting, entitled “From molecules to life: On the origin and function of molecules in chemical ecology” will take place from 3 – 5 September on the new Charles university campus – BIOCEV. The workshop aims to bring scientists from different backgrounds in chemical ecology and studying various taxons including bacteria, plants, insects and vertebrates. The meeting will focus on the detection of molecules with various mass spectrometry (MS) techniques. We will discuss their chemical names and databases that can be shared. Special aim will be given to various informatics tools that enable integration of datasets on different levels of resolution (soluble and volatile metabolites, proteins, and transcripts). Overall aim is to fill knowledge gaps in methodological approaches to finally advance the field of chemical ecology.
The first day, September 3, will be dedicated to scientific lectures covering, for example, mammalian chemical communication, insect pheromones, forest chemical ecology, and natural products. However, when more attendees will be interested to join our meeting, these topics will be extended. There is now particular format of the lectures simply because each of us may have different opinions on which format is the best. Time limit is also very fluid each of us may decide how long the talk will be but not going over 40 minutes.
The second day, September 4, will be organized in blocks of workshops. The aim of the workshop is to practically demonstrate particular pipelines that each of us uses in analyzing molecules in chemical ecology. The topics of the workshop will involve data mining, data analysis and data integration using R or Python. For example, we have data from different platforms (transcriptomes, proteomes, metabolomes) and there are different ways of integrating these datasets which will be also demonstrated.
The third day will be dedicated to individual discussions and a meeting on the potential opinion papers that may emerge from the lectures, workshops, and interactions between attendees.
There is no registration, if you plan to come to the meeting, please send us an email to moleculesforlife@biocev.org. Remind it is open only to E-NICHE members for reimbursement and number of participants is limited.
