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The Belgian Society for Viruses of Microbes (BSVoM) was founded on 9 June 2022 to capture and enhance the collaborative spirit among the expanding community of microbial virus researchers in Belgium. The sixteen founders are affiliated to fourteen different research entities across academia, industry and government. Its inaugural symposium was held on 23 September 2022 in the Thermotechnical Institute at KU Leuven. The meeting program covered three thematic sessions launched by international keynote speakers: (1) virus-host interactions, (2) viral ecology, evolution and diversity and (3) present and future applications. During the one-day symposium, four invited keynote lectures, ten selected talks and eight student pitches were given along with 41 presented posters. The meeting hosted 155 participants from twelve countries. ispartof: VIRUSES-BASEL vol:15 issue:5 ispartof: location:Switzerland status: published

This article belongs to the Special Issue Virus Bioinformatics 2022. This Special Issue is published alongside the International Virus Bioinformatics Meeting 2022 (ViBioM 2022) taking place in spring 2022 in Valencia, Spain., The International Virus Bioinformatics Meeting 2022 took place online, on 23-25 March 2022, and has attracted about 380 participants from all over the world. The goal of the meeting was to provide a meaningful and interactive scientific environment to promote discussion and collaboration and to inspire and suggest new research directions and questions. The participants created a highly interactive scientific environment even without physical face-to-face interactions. This meeting is a focal point to gain an insight into the state-of-the-art of the virus bioinformatics research landscape and to interact with researchers in the forefront as well as aspiring young scientists. The meeting featured eight invited and 18 contributed talks in eight sessions on three days, as well as 52 posters, which were presented during three virtual poster sessions. The main topics were: SARS-CoV-2, viral emergence and surveillance, virus-host interactions, viral sequence analysis, virus identification and annotation, phages, and viral diversity. This report summarizes the main research findings and highlights presented at the meeting., This research was funded by CSIC grant number CSIC-COV19-014, MCIU grant number PID2020-113888RB-I00, ISCIII grant number PI21/00139, and institutional grants to CBMSO from Fundación Ramón Areces and Banco Santander. D.B. (Denis Beslic) and K.K. were supported by the European Centers for Disease Control (grant number ECDC GRANT/2021/008 ECD.12222). D.B. (Dimitri Boeckaerts) was supported by the Research Foundation—Flanders (‘Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek—Vlaanderen’, 1S69520N). E.G.T. was supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (grant numbers BB/T015616, BB/T016256). E.B.H was funded by Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) grant number 31CA30 196046. D.J. is supported for his research on Fecal microbiota transplants in ulcerative colitis patients by the ‘Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek’ (Research foundation Flanders (1S78021N). A.L. was supported by the National Science Foundation award #1951678 and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation award GBMF9871. G.L.L. was funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Innovative Training Networks grant agreement number 955974 (VIROINF). P.L. was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 grant agreement number 725422-ReservoirDOCS, by Wellcome Trust project 206298/Z/17/Z (Artic Network), by the Research Foundation—Flanders (‘Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek—Vlaanderen’, G0D5117N and G051322N) and by NIH grant R01AI153044. L.N. was supported by the JSPS KAKENHI grant number JP 18H05506 and 21J22509. M.R. was funded by Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and DigLeben (Digitalisierung der Lebenswissenschaften—Wege in die Zukunft). F.W. was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; German Research Foundation) SFB 1021 (project number 197785619).