High Impact: Working Group and MC Meeting in Budva

All photos: © Mye-InfoBank 2024

High impact? Movers and shakers? Mye-InfoBank Working Group (WG) members were briefly subject to seismic activity - a "significant magnitude" 5.4 earthquake - in the Montenegro area during the early hours of the first day of their annual WG meeting. Fortunately, the effects on the region were minimal and the COST Action was able to knuckle down to business as usual, according to schedule, just a few hours later.

The agenda for day one was a tightly-tacted review of all the significant work and activities that have taken place in the Action's Belek-to-Budva time frame which included updates and work-in-progress feedback on the various Short-Term Scientific Missions (STSMs) on the standardisation of staining protocols for tissue macrophages, neutrophils, and dendritic cells, as well as the development of the computational pipeline for myeloid-focused single-cell atlas curation, and the establishment of marker panels for myeloid cells in chronic inflammatory diseases. Also shared were the outcomes of the mid-term WG 1/WG 2 joint research coordination meeting in Krakow, the training school on multiplex image analysis, and the three most recent neutrophil, macrophage, and dendritic cell-type annotation meetings. Further status reports were given on the Action's science communication activities and strategy, text mining analysis, the Mye-DACI tissue pipeline scientific network study, as well as an overview on the disease atlases.

The second day started with parallel sessions for the groups working specifically on advancing the areas of Mye-DACI, cell signatures and analysis of atlases, image analysis, and Mye-Dialogue. This was followed by a very stimulating poster session during which a couple of principle investigators were offered the opportunity to showcase their centers. However, the main spotlight was on Mye-InfoBank's young researchers who appreciated the great interest in their work and interactive debate fostered by this tailored session which was preceded by three-minute flash talks to rouse audience's focus and attention. The best presentation was selected by democratic vote and went to Kevin Mulder, with Ebru Kocakaya being awarded an extremely close second place, and Michelle Camacho Araque hot on their heels coming third.

The Budva meeting closed on the third day with the annual COST Action Management Committee (MC) meeting where a condensed summary of the year's COST Action activities was presented to the board and other items on the agenda were formally discussed.

Mye-InfoBank is indebted to Elvir Zvrko of the Univerzitet Crne Gore (University of Montenegro) for the impeccable hosting of the whole Budva four-day hybrid event: HVALA!

Scenes from the poster session with the finalists Michelle Camacho Araque (3rd place, holding SIMBA), Ebru Kocakaya (2nd place, poster detail), and Kevin Mulder (the final winner, with the mic).

All photos: © Mye-InfoBank 2024

Dates: 14-16 March 2024

Host: Elvir Zvrko

Location: Hotel Avala Resort & Villas, Mediteranska 2, 85310 Budva, Montenegro