We are thrilled to co-organize ICTC13, which will take place on 4-8 May 2025, in Chania, Crete, Greece. This is the biggest international event on all aspects on toxic cyanobacteria (ecology, management, omics, effects etc). Visit the conference website www.ictc13.gr and social media (twitter and facebook) to stay tuned for this exciting event !

We participate in a new research project "Elucidating and predicting the ecological roles of cyanopeptides in four Sao Paulo State Public water supply reservoirs" (2024-2029) coordinated by Mathias Chia and funded by FAPESP. Please see a call for PhD, MSc and undergraduate students for this project in the "Join us" page.

We gave an invited talk on "Targeted and untargeted mass spectrometry workflows in studies of aquatic microbial metabolism: A focus on cyanobacteria", by Sofia Iliakopoulou, Angelika-Ioanna Gialleli, Giovanni Andrea Vitale, Abzer Pakkir Mohamed Shah, Daniel Petras, Anastasia Hiskia, Triantafyllos Kaloudis, at the PHOENIX Conference, in Parthenope University, Naples.  The Book of Abstracts can be downloaded from the PHOENIX website.

Dr. Alexandros Polyzois (Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York) gave an invited talk on Friday 28 June. The title of the talk was  "Computational mass spectrometry and metabolomics, in drug discovery and chemical ecology".  The talk was followed by lots of discussions on computational metabolomics and possibilities for future collaborations.

Our colleagues and friends from EYATH S.A., Georgia Seretoudi,  Head Of Direction Water Facilities and Nikoletta Xanthopoulou, Lab Manager, visited our lab on Tuesday 28 May. We had the chance to discuss our work and possible collaborations on water quality. EYATH provides water supply and sewerage services to more than 1.2 million citizens in the greater Thessaloniki Urban Area.

The WaterTOP Virtual Conference included 15 speakers, among them 3 invited speakers, Tsair-Fuh Lin, Andrea Dietrich and Arash Zamyadi. The Conference was a big success, with 221 participants, the largest audience ever in an event dedicated to water T&O. The book of abstracts and the presentations can be found in WaterTOP's website. The full conference was recorded and is available in WaterTOP's YouTube Channel.

Sofia Iliakopoulou made two presentations in CEST2023,  a) "Transformation products of microcystin-RR with reactive species produced by radiolysis of water" (oral) and b) "Feature-based molecular networking and in silico structure annotation/classification of LC-HRMS data unfold the chemodiversity of cyanobacteria in environmental samples" (poster). Sofia's work shows how the use of untargeted MS analysis and computational tools enhances annotations of metabolites and their transformation products  in complex mixtures.

Sofia and Tri participated in the 3rd International Summer School on Non-Targeted Metabolomics & Data Mining for Biomedical Research, which took place on 21th - 25th August 2023, at the Statens Serum Institut, Copenhagen. This was a 5-day hands-on workshop on computational analysis of mass spectrometry data (MZmine, GNPS, SIRIUS, MS2LDA, MS2Query, FBMNstats etc., where training was carried out by the developers of these platforms, using real datasets.