Symbiosis Comes of age at the 10 Biennial Meeting of Researchers.

is an alpha-proteobacterial, obligate intracellular microbe and arguably the most successful infection on our planet, colonizing 40-60% of insect species. are also present in most, but not all, filarial nematodes where they are obligate mutualists and are the targets for anti-filarial drug discovery. Although are related to important human pathogens they do not infect mammals, but instead are well known for their reproductive manipulations of insect populations, inducing the following phenotypes: male-killing, feminization, parthenogenesis induction, or cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI). The most common of these, CI, results in a sperm-egg incompatibility and increases the relative fecundity of infected females in a population. In the last decade, have also been shown to provide a benefit to insects, where the infection can inhibit RNA virus replication within the host. cannot be cultivated outside of host cells and no genetic tools are available in the symbiont, limiting approaches available to its study. This means that many questions fundamental to our understanding of basic biology remained unknown for decades. The tenth biennial international conference, " Evolution, Ecology, Genomics and Cell Biology: A Chronicle of the Most Ubiquitous Symbiont", was held on June 17-22, 2018, Salem, MA USA. In the review below we highlight the new science presented at the meeting, link it to prior efforts to answer these questions across the genus, and the importance to the field of symbiosis. The topics covered in this review are based on the presentations at the conference.