Edinburgh Napier University

  The Protistology-UK 2017 spring meeting was organised as part of the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Microbiology Society in Edinburgh between the 3rd to the 6th of April 2017. The meeting was held at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC) and Protistology-UK was responsible for two sessions (three days in total), which were organised mainly by Anastasios Tsaousis (University of Kent, UK) and Sonja Rueckert (Edinburgh Napier University, UK) with the support from David Bass (Cefas and Natural History Museum of London, UK) and David Montagnes (University of Liverpool, UK). There were between 60 to 150 scientists and graduate students in attendance throughout the sessions; not only protistologists, but also microbiologists, from various backgrounds, interested in protistological research. The meeting was divided into two sessions: the first session, which was held on the 3rd of April, was focused on “Intracellular infection and endosymbiosis within protists” and the second session, which was held on the 4th and 5th of April, was dedicated to Aquatic Microbiology, especially “New model organisms and new challenges”. The sessions were chaired by Anastasios Tsaousis, Sonja Rueckert, David Bass, Jackie Parry (Lancaster University, UK), Christopher Lane (University of Rhode Island, USA), David Montagnes and John Dolan (CNRS, France). We are grateful to the support by the Microbiology Society, enabling us to invite six speakers from North America, six from Europe and twelve from the United Kingdom. In addition, the sessions were sponsored by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which provided support for some of the invited speakers and travel grants to the graduate students that have attended the conference and presented posters.