Abstract

The past conferences and the preceding workshops of this conference series have explored yeasts as models to study questions of general relevance to evolution and ecology. Speakers were selected that brought expertise to the meeting in a range of topics, from evolutionary theory, ecologists, yeast geneticists, cell biologists, genomics and systems biology. The explicit intention to identify and address fundamental questions of evolution and ecology generated an open and interactive environment that enabled fruitful discussions across boundaries of individual expertise. Beyond this, selected speakers with expertise from different areas, from computational evolutionary simulations, evolutionary cancer biology or protein evolution led to many stimulating discussions that we now would like to continue more pronouncedly in the next series of conferences. Therefore, we have selected a broad range of new speakers for this last conference, and we decided to reinvite only a small number of approx. 4 speakers from the 3rd conference, where we felt that their future progress would be of highest importance for the audience.