Dear colleagues,

This autumn, University of Belgrade – Faculty of Biology together with Delft University of Technology will be organizing a workshop entitled „From Genomic Analysis to Functional Models in Microbiomes and Synthetic Consortia“ – BiomeFUN 2025. It will take place from September 15-19, 2025 in Belgrade, Serbia (Hotel Palace, Topličin venac 23).

We would like to bring together people from different fields who are trying to unite the trends of genomic analysis of microbiome studies and synthetic consortia that can be translated into practical applications for more sustainable agriculture. The workshop is designed more as a practical learning event. Our target audience is mainly PhD students and postdocs, who will spend half of the workshop doing exercises on genomics and modeling in R/Python. Personal laptops are required. Prerequisite knowledge in Bash, Python, R is mandatory.

The workshop is supported by Federation of European Microbiological Societies (FEMS) and the Serbian Ministry of Science, Technological Development and Innovation. Thanks to our main sponsors, we are pleased to offer several grants for registration fees and accommodation to PhD and Early Career Scientists participants from low- and middle-income countries.

Further information can be found at: https://bgmicrobiomes.github.io/

In addition, we have received a special invitation from Max Häggblom, Editor-in-Chief of FEMS Microbiology Ecology, to contribute to a thematic issue based on the topic of our workshop. Your contributing work could be selected for publication in this prestigious journal. This collection will be a mixture of research papers and mini-reviews.

Please help us spread the word in your network and among your colleagues, doctoral students and postdocs, including our promotional flyer.

We would be very pleased to welcome you to our beautiful city of Belgrade.

With kind regards,

Organizational team of BiomeFUN 2025