The first session of the Janelia Farm Conference “Learning and Memory: A Synthesis of Flies and Honeybees” was all about the molecular processes supporting learning and memory. In fact, it wasmy impression that more and more research in this field is geared towards the processes supporting memory, in the minnutes, hours and days after the learning has taken place. The processes were very diverse, both in terms of the molecular cascades studied and in terms of the neurons where these processes take place. MAP Kinase was a prominent name mentioned in several of the talks and of course the mushroom bodies fatured prominently. Besides these large themes, the ubiquitin-proteasome system was shown to be involved in long-term memory in honeybees and how that interacted with extinction memory. Ron Davis talked about how histone-acetylating complexes ('elongator') are important for long-term memory in Drosophila.