Nordic EMBL partnership meeting 2026

My first trip in the new job was to the annual Nordic EMBL partnership meeting, hosted by MIMS in Umeå, Sweden. It was really enjoyable to go to a conference without a lot of work distracting me from back home, so I could just enjoy listening to the talks. The four institutes cover diverse science, from statistical genetics to neurophysiology to detailed cell biology.

Sebastian Baumgarten from the Institut Pasteur gave a wonderfully clear talk about ribosomes in the malaria parasite. I was only barely familiar with the requisite background (what’s a ribosome? where does plasmodium replicate?) but Sebastian did a great job pitching his talk to a general audience, and his slide illustrations were a breath of fresh air. One thing it reminded me of is that nucleic acids are humungous compared to most proteins, whereas my mental model is always that DNA and RNA are little and proteins are big. I think it comes from an implicit false analogy between blueprints and the thing you build. And ubiquitous protein/RNA complexes are everywhere nowadays with all the exciting discoveries of developmental disorders caused by mutations in the various splicosome RNAs (RNU-4-2 et al.).

The city was a lovely place to visit, too, and we got lucky with a fair amount of early autumn sunshine.