28th Hennig conference for evolutionary biologists opens

22 June 2009

NUS, together with the Singapore Botanic Gardens - National Parks Board, jointly hosted the Hennig XXVIII conference for evolutionary biologists which was held from 22 - 26 June 2009. The conference is being held for the first time in Asia.

Themed "Darwin, Wallace and Evolution", the opening event of the conference celebrated the contributions of two renowned scientists - Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace - to the field of evolutionary biology. At the conference, stories of Darwin and Wallace were re-visted and Prof Naomi Pierce of the Harvard University illustrated how evolutionary theory is used in modern research on Lycaenidae, a type of butterfly.

A symposium on the phylogenetic approaches to public and environmental health, with a focus on influenza A virus H1N1, will be held during the conference. The topics to be discussed include linking genomes with geography to fight the global H1N1 outbreak, ongoing sequence variation of the H1N1 virus relative to drug and antibody binding sites, as well as the evolutionary pathways which led to the emergence of the swine-origin H1N1 virus that eventually caused the recent influenza outbreak.

The conference is named after Willi Hennig, a German biologist best known for his works in the development of phylogenetic systematics, a theory of the investigation and presentation of the relations that exist among species. The conference has been held annually since 1980 in various parts of the world.