The Bergey's Manual Trust met for its annual trust meeting in China during the Fifth Meeting of Bergey's International Society for Microbial Systematics (BISMiS) in Guangzhou, China on November 6-9, 2023. The Bergey's Manual Trust was a co-organizer for the meeting.

At the meeting, the Trust also presented its Bergey Award and Bergey Medal. Markus Göker received the Bergey Award, which is given to recognize outstanding contributions to bacterial taxonomy. Göker is head of the phylogenomics group at the Leibniz Institute DSMZ and secretary of the Judicial Commission of the International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes. Barny Whitman, an emeritus professor of microbiology of the University of Georgia and who has been involved in Bergey's Manual and Bergey's International Society over the years, received the Bergey Medal. The Bergey Medal is awarded to recognize outstanding and life-long contributions to the systematics of Bacteria and Archaea.

Bergey's Manual Trust will co-sponsor a symposium at FEMS-2019 (9 July 2019 11:30-12:30) entitled Linking Microbial Systematics and Ecology. Speakers will include Brian Hedlund, Svetlana Dedysh, Holger Daims, Andreas Brune and Susumu Sakata.

Bergey's Manual Trust recently hosted a meeting to bring together experts on phylogenomics to discuss the incorporation of phylogenomics into the content and taxonomic outline of BMSAB. The meeting was attended by Phil Hugenholtz and Donovan Parks from the Australian National Genomics Centre, Frank-Oliver Glöckner and Pelin Yilmaz from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, and Markus Göcker from the DSMZ.