During January a group of FABIans participated in the 45th Conference of the South African Association of Botanists (SAAB) which was held in conjunction with the Southern African Society for Systematics and Biosystematics (SASSB) and the African Mycological Association (AMA) on the campus of the University of Johannesburg. The FABI team did well and walked away with several prizes. Chrizelle Beukes won the prize for the best PhD presentation in Systematics, while Seamus Morgan and Shawn Fell respectively won the prizes for the best MSc and Honours presentations in Mycology. Congratulations to these students for flying the FABI banner! ORAL PRESENTATIONS Martin Coetzee - Multilocus phylogenies and morphological analyses revealed new and previously described Ganoderma species in South Africa Shaun Fell - Ambrosia beetles and their associated fungi infesting native Combretum trees in Pretoria Marike Palmer - All ANIs are not created equal Chrizelle Beukes - Bradyrhizobium leobordeae sp. nov., a rhizobial symbiont of the indigenous South African papilionoid Leobordea polycephala Juanita Avontuur - The many faces of Bradyrhizobium: from nodulation to photosynthesis Seamus Morgan - Insights into mating systems of Quambalaria and other Exobasidiomycetes using genome sequences Wilhelm de Beer - The Polyphagous Shothole Borer and its fungi: a threat to native forest ecosystems in South Africa? POSTERS Khumbudzo Ndhlovu - Characterization of wild isolates of alpha and beta rhizobia for nodulation of essential legumes Runlei Chang - Ophiostomatoid fungi associated with mites phoretic on bark beetles in Qinghai, China Lazarus Mavima - The taxonomy of Paraburkholderia and Paraburkholderia tuberum-like isolates from South Africa