The Barcelona Collaboratorium for Modelling and Predictive Biology held its 2026 Annual Symposium on 28–29 September 2026. EMBL Barcelona and the CRG run the Collaboratorium together. The symposium was titled Biological Time: From Molecules to Evolution, and it met in the Mare Nostrum auditorium in Barcelona. Eric Latorre Crespo and Jordi García-Ojalvo organised the scientific programme. Melike and Ulaş represented the group.
Melike gave her talk, Ageing where selection declines: from genomes to populations, on Tuesday 29 September in Session III, Aging – When Time is Perturbed. Natural selection weakens over adulthood, and the talk followed the consequences of this decline from genomes to populations, with examples from the group’s published and ongoing work. Ulaş presented a poster in the poster session of Day 2, Ecological and Evolutionary Dynamics of the Aging Killifish Gut, on how the gut microbiome of the turquoise killifish changes over the host’s adult life. Melike wrote to the group after the first afternoon that this was one of the highest quality events she had attended in a long time. Ulaş added that the quality of the talks stayed high throughout and that the organisation was very good. Some of the talks we noted:
- Felix Ritort (University of Barcelona) on heatomics, the heat that living matter produces as a layer of biology in its own right.
- Miki Ebisuya (TU Dresden) on the stem cell zoo, a platform for comparing developmental time and shape across species.
- Vikas Trivedi (EMBL Barcelona) on metabolic control of multicellular transitions.
- Thomas Höfer (DKFZ) on the breakdown of the blood-forming hierarchy in the evolution of leukaemia.
- Alejo Rodriguez-Fraticelli (IRB Barcelona) on the origins and dynamics of non-genetic diversity among blood stem cells.
- Kirsty Wan (Exeter) on motility in single-celled organisms.
- Didier Gonze (Brussels) on the design principles and physiological roles of biological clocks.
- Ala Trusina (Niels Bohr Institute) on robust patterning in early embryo development.
- Donate Weghorn (CRG) on the temporal dynamics of a human germline mutational hotspot.
- Manuel Collado (CIMUS) on new approaches that target cellular senescence.
Flash talks, a poster session over lunch and a speakers’ dinner the evening before gave us many chances to meet people. We came home with new names to follow. We thank the Collaboratorium team for the invitation and for the care they put into the two days.