Journal of Molecular Evolution: A European Meeting

The Journal of Molecular Evolution has established a series of periodic meetings rotating around the continents. The first meeting was in Washington, DC in March, 2023. We now are proud to organize the second meeting in Madrid, Spain, August 25-28, 2025, with support from Springer Nature and the National Museum of Natural Sciences-CSIC (Spain). Timed to coordinate in the days after the European Society of Evolution Biology meeting ESEB 2025 in Barcelona, August 17-22, 2025, this meeting with free registration will feature invited talks from editorial board members, selected talks from submitted abstracts, and a poster session.

On the 28th of August, the meeting will host a special mixed online and in-person symposium dedicated to “Evolutionary intelligence: How coevolution opened the way to the AlphaFold revolution” with participation from some of the main players of this remarkable achievement. The symposium will focus on the evolutionary principles that underlie the revolution in protein structure prediction based on evolutionary correlations. The game-changing success of AlphaFold was built on the recognition that coevolution-driven correlations in protein sequences can unlock structural predictions when inferred with cutting-edge computational methods like inverse statistical mechanics and neural networks. We will dive into these developments and their evolutionary foundations, highlighting the ongoing debate on the evolutionary mechanisms that produce the observed correlations.

JME will dedicate a special issue to the meeting and the symposium.

The meeting will take place in the Museum Auditorium. Attendance is limited to 120 participants, so please register early. The registration deadline is May 30, 2025, with priority given to those who register by March 1, 2025.

The Journal of Molecular Evolution has a long history of serving the molecular evolution community. It was founded in 1971 by luminary scientist Emile Zuckerkandl and has had a long history of publishing fundamental advances, such as molecular phylogenetics. As the journal progresses in 2025 and beyond, we hope to recapture that history and embrace publication in many areas involving computational methods and theory related to molecular evolution.

We encourage submissions of work to present from all areas covered by the journal.

The Journal of Molecular Evolution covers experimental, computational, and theoretical work aimed at deciphering features of molecular evolution and the processes bearing on these features, from the initial formation of macromolecular systems through their evolution at the molecular level, the co-evolution of their functions in cellular and organismal systems, and their influence on organismal origins, adaptation, speciation, and ecology.

Topics addressed in the journal include the evolution of informational macromolecules and their relation to more complex levels of biological organization, including populations and taxa, as well as the molecular basis for the evolution of ecological interactions of species and the use of molecular data to infer fundamental processes in evolutionary ecology. This coverage accommodates such subfields as new genome sequences, comparative structural and functional genomics, population genetics, the molecular evolution of development, the evolution of gene regulation and gene interaction networks, and in vitro evolution of DNA and RNA, molecular evolutionary ecology, and the development of methods and theory that enable molecular evolutionary inference, including but not limited to, phylogenetic methods. Origins of life and astrobiology are also core areas covered in the journal.

The next meeting in a few years will be in Asia, in Bangalore, India. We hope you will support and enjoy our meeting series.