Professor Fanus Venter recently attended the meeting of the International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes (ICSP) in Valencia, Spain from 7-9 July as representative of the South African Society for Microbiology . At the meeting, he was re-elected to the ICSP Executive Board and will form part of two ad-hoc committees, which will investigate the creation of a new open-source journal for bacterial species announcements as well as the use of genome sequences as type material when describing new species. Normal 0 false false false EN-ZA JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:8.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:107%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} He was also invited to present a lecture at the 7 th Congress of European Microbiologists ( FEMS 2017 ) in Valencia as one of four invited speakers to a session on the role of genome sequence analysis in polyphasic taxonomy and prokaryotic systematics. His talk “Phenotypic checklists: What are the alternatives?” included the work of a number of FABI postgraduate students working on the genome informed biology of novel Bradyrhizobium species.