Three hundred attendees from twenty-four countries attended the recent SIMB Conference on Natural Product Discovery and Development in the Post-genomic Era. Members representing the Korean Society for Microbiology and Biotechnology and the Society for Actinomycetes Japan were well represented with over 70 delegates. The four-day meeting featured keynote and banquet talks by Greg Verdine, Warp Drive Bio and Julian Davies, University of British Columbia as well as six general sessions and over 125 posters. Many thanks to the international organizing committee and our corporate sponsors. Special thanks go to conference program chairs Richard Baltz, CognoGen Biotechnology Consulting and SIMB Past President, Leonard Katz, SynBerc, UC-Berkeley for developing.

A special issue of the Journal of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology (JIMB) will feature selected papers from the meeting and is scheduled for publication in early 2016.