The 1st Asian Congress of Protistology (ACOP) & 8th Asian Conference of Ciliate Biology was held in Jeju Island, Korea from October 3 to 6, 2011. Prof. MIAO Wei, principal investigator of the Research Group of Protozoan Functional Genomics at Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IHB), together with Assistant Technician YUAN Dongxia and his doctoral student XIONG Jie attended this conference.  

The conference deals with the broad field of protistology, covering five topics, i.e. 1. systematics, phylogeny and diversity; 2. ecology and environments; 3. molecular biology, genetics, biochemistry and physiology; 4. medical parasitology and parasites; 5. symbiosys.  

Prof. MIAO Wei made a presentation entitled “Mating type determination in Tetrhymena thermophila involves a unique mechanism of programmed somatic DNA deletion” and “Transcriptome analysis of Tetrahymena thermophila”, introducing the mating type determination mechanism of Tetrhymena thermophila and the advancement of Tetrahymena transcriptome using deep RNA sequencing. XIONG Jie, doctoral student who’s now studying at IHB, made a presentation entitled “Gene network of the ciliate Tetrahymena thermophila”, introducing the Tetrahymena gene network which is constructed based on the microarray data and Tetrahymena functional genomics database (TetraFGD, http://tfgd.ihb.ac.cn/). 

The discipline of protistology is becoming increasingly active in Asia, but so far, the only conferences in this area have focused on ciliate biology. The 1st AOCP provides new opportunities for many Asian protistologists and is significant in pushing forward the development of protistology in Asia. The next conference will be held in India in 2013.