James and Jasmin together with our collaborators Alexander Hübner, Irina Velsko, and Maxime Borry from the MPI-EVA in Leipzig visited Estonia for two conferences which were held in Tartu:
- The 5th meeting of the Standards, Precautions, Advances in Ancient Metagenomics (SPAAM5) community took place in the Tartu Nature House, where James and Maxime gave invited talks on current SPAAM Community projects, and Irina and Jasmin additionally gave flash talks on their current research.
- The 10th International Symposium for Biomolecular Archaeology (ISBA10) took place in the Estonian National Museum. Here, Irina, Alex, and James gave talks on genomic characterization of novel microbial taxa from ancient dental calculus, the recently published reconstruction of the novel Palaeofuran, and a new project aiming to standardise metadata reporting (MInAS) of all ancient DNA sequences, respectively. Furthermore, Jasmin presented a poster on the (meta-)genome screening pipeline nf-core/funcscan, and Maxime presented a poster on the reconstruction of ancient microbial genomes from wine ferments of the Roman biblical king Herod with which he won the ISBA10 poster prize!
