Translation UK 2025: Celebrating 30 years

The Translation UK conference recently celebrated its 30th “birthday”. The first “official” meeting was organised by Cathy Prescott and took place at the SmithKline Beecham site in Brockham Park, Surrey, in 1994 and followed a one-off gathering the year before at St. George’s in London organised by Mike Clemens. And so, in late June, ~130 delegates from the UK and far beyond (e.g., USA, Spain, Germany and India) met for the 30th time at the John McIntyre Conference Centre at the University of Edinburgh.We focused on the conservation and similarities of the translational control machinery and regulation across the kingdoms of life, and our superb invited academic speakers covered bacterial (Allen Buskirk, Johns Hopkins University), plant (Catharina Merchante, University of Malaga), and invertebrate (Tim Weil, University of Cambridge) mRNA translation, whilst our excellent invited industry speaker (Veronika Georgieva, BioNTech SE) covered mRNA optimisation technologies for human vaccine development. Numerous fungal, viral, and mammalian talks and/or posters then ensured that all kingdoms were represented and well covered. Crucially, these were not separated into distinct sessions but were mixed across sessions that were themed around translational components, processes, (dys)regulation, and/or applications.The conference had a lively discussion about terminology to describe translated regions of genomes and RNA, focused around the proposal of “Translon” as a single term for translated regions led by Pasha Baranov (University College, Cork).The quality of talks (including 20 flash talks) was consistently excellent, and a powerful indicator that the field continues to produce significant talent was that almost 70% of the talks selected from abstracts and 100% of flash talks were given by students or early postdocs. Of particular note were the talk prize winners; Mara Meuller (MPI for Brain Research) (student) and Cameron Cole (MRC Toxicology Unit, Cambridge) (postdoc). Similarly, the posters continued the quality and provided for extremely active sessions that were extended to >2 hrs each in response to previous delegate feedback. The poster prize winners were Ella Dimascio (University of Leeds) (student) and Haaris Ahsan Safdari (University of Hamburg) (postdoc). We are grateful to Bioscience Reports for sponsoring these prizes.We endeavoured to further support emerging talent by having the majority of our sessions chaired by students or postdocs and by organising an Early Career event in which a panel with diverse experience in academic, biotech, and other science-adjacent industries shared insights into the varied ways in which their careers had “developed”, whether by accident or design, and tried to convey an understanding that there is no such thing as a single, linear career trajectory. We are extremely grateful to the panel members, in particular to Marja Main (Edinburgh Neuroscience), Chris Moffat (Promega), and Olivia Rowe (Biochemical Society/Portland Press), who were not among the meeting delegates and took time out to contribute.We also extended the coffee/networking breaks to encourage delegate interactions, which led to a genuine buzz accompanying these periods and numerous reports of insights being shared and new collaborations being formed. We were also able to use these periods for fevered negotiations regarding Translation UK 2026 and were delighted that the Leeds University researchers will host the community next year.A meeting of this size and complexity cannot happen without significant financial and logistical help, and we are incredibly grateful to the Biochemical Society for their fantastic support, especially to Rachel Inkster for all her amazing coordination efforts and Lauren Flitcroft for working with Rachel to ensure that we organisers could focus on enjoying the scientific aspects of the meeting. Special thanks also to Hannah Atkins, who coordinated the recruitment of our generous sponsors (BMKGene, Cambridge Bioscience, CliniSciences, EIRNABio, GENEWIZ, NEB, Promega, Vazyme, and Vectorbuilder), enabling us to keep registration costs down and widen participation. The Biochemical Society also awarded multiple bursaries to further improve meeting access to postgraduates and early-career researchers, and it was noteworthy that significant numbers of delegates were first-time attendees, which further indicates the vitality of the field and the meeting.All in all, a worthy 30th birthday party, and we look forward to (at least some of) the next 30 years. Starting in Leeds in 2026. See you there.Programme committee: Matt Brook, Cathy Abbott, Niki Gray, Paul Donlin-Asp, and Edward Wallace (University of Edinburgh).The happy delegatesThe happy prize winners and Niki Gray awarding the prizes on behalf of Bioscience Reports (top image).The happy invited speakers (bottom image, L-R; Tim Weil, Veronika Georgieva, Catharina Merchante, and Allen Buskirk) and the organisers (L-R; Matt Brook, Edward Wallace, Paul Donlin-Asp, Cathy Abbott, and Niki Gray, with meeting coordinator Rachel Inkster) who were happy that it was finally over and had been a success.