I was invited to speak in a symposium on monitoring for resistance to Bt at the 2006 combined Meetings of the Society of Invertebrate Pathology and VIII International Conference on Bacillus thuringiensis (ICBt). These meetings were held in Wuhan, China from 27th August until 1st September 2006. The major output from the trip was to disseminate my latest research results to my peers by presenting a talk in the symposium entitled "Monitoring and managing for Bt-resistance in Australia: The challenges for the next decade". The talks in the symposium gave an International overview of the latest developments in Bt resistance monitoring in terms of current methodologies and up-to-date findings. Our approach to monitoring in Australia was well received and there was considerable interest in my reports of a higher than anticipated frequency of alleles conferring resistance to Cry2Ab in H. armigera. All of the talks in the symposium were presented as written papers in a special edition of the Journal of Invertebrate Pathology in Volume 95 (see below). I established contact with key international researchers in my field of Bt resistance monitoring including Saku Sivasupramaniam from Monsanto, who has subsequently visited ACRI, and Carlos Blanco from the USDA, whom I have been in regular contact with since the meeting. In particular, Carlos and I discussed approaches to studies of sperm precedence and I have since reviewed several of his papers on this topic. I also established an important link with Ryan Kurtz, a research entomologist with Syngenta, and met face-to-face with a collaborator David Heckle, from the Max Plank Institute in Germany and the University of Melbourne, and discussed progress on the CRDC funded project on isolating the Cry2Ab resistance gene in Helicoverpa armigera. Attending the meetings increased my breadth of knowledge by attending talks outside my direct area of interest that focused on microbial control, mechanisms of resistance, and Bt-performance enhancement.