2025 i5k Annual Meeting Announcement

Please join us for the 2025 i5k Annual Meeting on October 15th, 10:30am - 12 pm EDT! During this year’s meeting, which is open to i5k members and non-members alike, we invite you to a 30-minute keynote presentation by Dr. Rena Schweizer on recent insights from the Beenome100 Project. You will hear about i5k working group accomplishments, which were established to fulfill our new mission and vision. Finally, you will get to voice your opinions on i5k’s progress during an open community discussion. Please register here for this important meeting!

Agenda (All times Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-4):

  1. 10:30 am: Welcome
  2. 10:35 am: Keynote presentation by Dr. Rena Schweizer (USDA/ARS/PWA Pollinating Insect Research Unit and Affiliate, University of Montana), Title: “Beenome100: Insight into the evolutionary dynamics of genome size and content of bees.”
  3. 11:05 am: Progress on i5k’s new mission and vision – presentations by i5k’s working groups on their recent accomplishments.
    1. i5k Executive Committee (Monica Poelchau)
    2. Outreach and Communications (Brad Coates)
    3. Training (Teresa Shippy)
    4. Genome Project Coordination (Monica Poelchau)
    5. Standards (Eric Tvedte)
  4. 11:35 am: Open community discussion. This is your opportunity to comment on i5k’s progress and plans.

Meeting registration link: https://buffalo.zoom.us/meeting/register/Xz_gNSfxQ1mS_xbZKA9F5g#/registration

Keynote presentation abstract:

Bees represent an evolutionarily and ecologically diverse species-rich group. Despite there being around 4000 species within North America, very few have chromosome-level reference genomes that are publicly available. The mission of Beenome100 is to sequence, assemble, and annotate high-quality reference genomes for 100+ U.S. bee pollinators, with a focus on native bees of conservation, management, and agricultural importance. Here, we present analyses of our Phase I data set of ~200 genomes, covering up to 7 families and 32 tribes of primarily U.S. native bees. We use comparative genomics approaches to explore evolutionary dynamics of genome structure, including genome size, chromosome number, repetitive element content, and gene content, considering bee natural history. Our results elucidate broad patterns of genome evolution across bees, and provide an immense resource for further exploration by the research community.