After a lovely week in Paris a couple of weeks back for the "EMBO Conference on hijacking host signalling and epigenetic mimicry during infections", and a week off in Portugal for some quality family time, I'm back on the road. This time I'm in Heidelberg, to attend another EMBO meeting, now dedicated to "New Approaches and Concepts in Microbiology". It's a great line-up and, judging by day 1, some great stories, including a few mentions of Nature Microbiology (for example, by Daniel Dar when talking about Term-Seq; and Nassos Typas when describing Iris).

I'd like to promise that I'll keep you posted on what's happening here regularly, but judging by my monumental failure to write a summary after day 1 from the Paris meeting, I'm not so sure I'll have much free time. But if you're also attending the meeting, please come find me for a chat - that is a promise I can keep!