My ISME Program Monday and Tuesday

I have tried to put together a list of talks I find interesting at ISME14 next week (oh, well going through the program book I find virtually all talks interesting, but some of them more so than others). I didn’t get there quite yet, but I have a list for monday and tuesday. I have realized that monday morning will likely run smoothly (a tough call between von Mering and Gilbert at 11.30, but otherwise the choices were not too hard). Monday afternoon I will probably spend in Session Room B3, where the Microbial Community Diversity: 16S and Beyond session will take place (many sessions have really silly, non-informative, names at this conference – what would not fit into the concept “16S and beyond“?). I will really miss the talk by Otto X. Cordero on bacteria act as socially cohesive units and antibiotic resistance, but I simply don’t think there will be time for a trip to Hall A2 and back just for that talk.

Tuesday is a lot messier, and can not have been planned with my interests in mind. Everything seems to happen at once here. I guess I will spend the morning discussing Mobility of genes and the species concept in Auditorium 12, but then I’ll be missing out talks on dormancy and genes under selection pressure I really would have liked to hear. But it gets even worse in the afternoon. Here I would really have needed Hermione’s time-turner. I’ll try to start the afternoon with Effects of loss of rare microbes on soil ecosystem services by Gera Hol in Auditorium 10, but will then miss at least two other diversity talks. Then, I will largely prioritize the Auditorium 12 talks on mobility of genes, with a small trip to Hall A2, where Kristian Koefoed Brandt will discuss antibiotic and metal resistance. Sadly, I will miss so many important talks this afternoon.

Another tough call is the round table discussions on Monday evening. Here, however, I feel that I have a duty to attend to the Unraveling the bacterial mobilome: Potentials and limitations of the present methodology session in Auditorium 11, which also might be the most relevant one for my current research projects.

Below you find my list of interesting talks at ISME14, sorted by time. Times in bold are the ones I will aim to attend in case I have to make a choice. Also, of course I will attend my own poster presentation on Monday afternoon (poster board number 267A). Hope to see you there!

Monday

Morning session

1000 – 1030 Cross-biome comparisons of soil microbial communities and their functional potentials
Noah Fierer, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA (Hall A2)

1030 – 1100 Experimental biogeography of bacteria in miniature ecosystems
Thomas Bell, Imperial College, London, UK (Hall A2)

1130 – 1200 Tracking OTUs around the environment – a challenge for clustering algorithms and interpretation
Christian von Mering, University of Zurich, Switzerland (Hall A1)

1130 – 1200   The Earth Microbiome Project: A new paradigm in geospatial and temporalstudies of microbial ecology
Jack A. Gilbert, Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago, USA (Hall A2)

Afternoon session

1330 – 1345 What makes a bacterium fresh? Genome wide functional comparison of marine and freshwater SAR11
Alexander Eiler [Sweden] (Auditorium 15)

1330 – 1345 Rarity and the problem of measuring diversity
Bart Haegeman [France] (Session Room B3)

1345 – 1400 Complexity does not necessarily create diversity
Tom Curtis [United Kingdom] (Session Room B3)

1345 – 1400 Depletion of the rare bacterial biosphere in expanding oceanic oxygen minimum zones
J. Michael Beman [USA] (Session Room B4)

1400 – 1415 Selection history affects the predictability of microbial ecosystem development
Andrew Free [United Kingdom] (Session Room B3)

1415 – 1430 Can we use microbial life strategies to understand the response of microbial communities to moisture stress?
Sarah Evans [USA] (Session Room B3)

1430 – 1445 Towards a unified taxonomy for ribosomal RNA databases
Pelin Yilmaz [Germany] (Session Room B3)

1445 – 1500 Systematic design of 18S rDNA primers for assessing eukaryotic diversity
Luisa Hugerth [Sweden] (Session Room B3)

1445 – 1500 Either Of yeast, grapes and wasps: Saccharomyces cerevisiae ecology revised
Irene Stefanini [Italy] (Hall A1)

1500 – 1515 Soil bacterial biogeography: a taxonomic and functional perspective
Rob Griffiths [United Kingdom] (Hall A1)

1500 – 1515 Ecological populations of bacteria act as socially cohesive units of antibiotic production and resistance in the wild
Otto X. Cordero [USA] (Hall A2)

1515 – 1530 Micro-scale drivers of bacterial diversity and biogeography
George Kowalchuk [Netherlands] (Hall A1)

1515 – 1530 Time and space resolved deep metagenomics to investigate selection pressures on low abundant species in complex environments
Mads Albertsen [Denmark] (Session Room B3)

1515 – 1530 Bacterial community structure and composition in high arsenic contaminated ground water from West Bengal and microbial role in subsurface arsenic release
Pinaki Sar [India] (Auditorium 10)

Evening session (round-table discussions)

17:30 – 19:30  RT11: Microbial Network Ecology: Deciphering Complex Network Interactions in Microbial Communities (Hall A3)

17:30 – 19:30 RT16: Unraveling the bacterial mobilome: Potentials and limitations of the present methodology (Auditorium 11)

17:30 – 19:30  RT17: Microbial invasions: What defines whether a microorganism is an invasive species? (Auditorium 12)

Tuesday

Morning session

08:30 – 09:20 You are what you eat but not always what omics predicts: On the importance of single cell ecophysiology of microbes
Michael Wagner, Department of Microbial Ecology, University of Vienna, Austria (Hall A1)

1000 – 1030 Can dormancy theory help us retrieve rare and uncultured microbes?
Jay Lennon, Indiana University, USA (Hall A3)

1000 – 1030 A critical review of mean metabolic rates of subsurface microbial communities
Bo Barker Jørgensen, University of Aarhus, Denmark (Auditorum 11)

1000 – 1030 Horizontal genetic transfer and the origin of species in bacteria
Frederick M. Cohan, Wesleyan University, USA (Auditorum 12)

1030 – 1100 Phylogenomic networks reveal mechanisms for lateral gene transfer during microbial evolution
Tal Dagan, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany (Auditorum 12)

1100 – 1130 Coevolution between plasmids and their hosts: consequences for the persistence of drug resistance
Eva Top, University of Idaho, USA (Auditorum 12)

1130 – 1200 The communal gene pool in natural environments
Søren J. Sørensen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (Auditorum 12)

1130 – 1200 Let genomes do the talking: Using genomics to unravel genes under selection in archaeal populations
Rachel Whitaker, University of Illinois, USA (Auditorum 15)

Afternoon session

1330 – 1345 Spatial patterns of microbial communities at a soil microscale
Florentin Constancias [France] (Hall A2)

1330 – 1345 Microbial biofilm biodiversity distribution in a stream network
Katharina Besemer [Austria] (Session Room B3)

1330 – 1345 Effects of loss of rare microbes on soil ecosystem services
Gera Hol [Netherlands] (Auditorium 10)

1345 – 1400 Targeted recovery of novel phylogenetic diversity from next-generation sequence data
Josh D. Neufeld [Canada] (Auditorium 10)

1345 – 1400 Functionally relevant microdiversity of Nitrospira-like bacteria in activated sludge
Christiane Dorninger [Austria] (Hall A3)

1345 – 1400 Hot spot of horizontal gene transfer: high abundance and diversity of mobile genetic elements in bacterial communities of on-farm pesticide biopurification systems
Kornelia Smalla [Germany] (Auditorium 12)

1400 – 1415 Transcriptional dynamics of catabolic genes in soil – fine-scale analysis for a deeper understanding of soil functioning
Mette H Nicolaisen [Denmark] (Hall A1)

1400 – 1415 Seasonal synchronicity and specificity of microbial community and population dynamics across four alpine lakes
Ryan Mueller [Spain] (Session Room B3)

1400 – 1415 Mapping genotypic diversity onto niche adaptation
Yutaka Yawata [USA] (Auditorium 12)

1415 – 1430 Soil bacterial community shift after chitin enrichment: an integrative metagenomic approach
Samuel Jacquiod [France] (Hall A3)

1415 – 1430 MetaGenomic Species: adding structure to metagenomics data
H. Bjørn Nielsen [Denmark] (Auditorium 12)

1430 – 1445 Impact of diet on human gut microbial communities
Cindy Nakatsu [USA] (Hall A3)

1430 – 1445 Insights into the bovine rumen plasmidome
Itzhak Mizrahi [Israel] (Auditorium 12)

1445 – 1500 Mechanisms of biocide-induced antibiotic resistance: from single cell to community
Seungdae Oh [USA] (Hall A3)

1445 – 1500 Antibiotic resistance in soil bacterial communities: comparison of metals and antibiotic residues as selecting agents and spatial heterogeneity of coselected resistance patterns
Kristian Koefoed Brandt [Denmark] (Hall A2)

1445 – 1500 Viruses, a controlling force on Prokaryotic diversity?
Ruth-Anne Sandaa [Norway] (Session Room B4)

1445 – 1500 Regulation of transfer of the ICEclc element of Pseudomonas
Jan Roelof van der Meer [Switzerland] (Auditorium 12)

1500 – 1515 Pathogen removal in slow sand filters as revealed by stable isotope probing coupled with next generation sequencing
Sarah Haig [United Kingdom] (Hall A3)

1500 – 1515 Development of zinc tolerance by the ammonia oxidising community is restricted to ammonia oxidising Bacteria, rather than Archaea
Stefan Ruyters [Belgium] (Hall A2)

1500 – 1515 Survival strategies of plasmids in chemostats and biofilms: effect of hostrange and competition
Jan-Ulrich Kreft [United Kingdom] (Auditorium 12)

1515 – 1530 Evaluating process-related and seasonal changes in bacterial community in drinking water treatment and distribution systems
Ameet Pinto [USA] (Hall A3)

1515 – 1530 Distribution, diversity, and evolution of cyclic peptide secondary metabolites in natural populations of marine picocyanobacteria
Andres Cubillos-Ruiz [USA] (Hall A1)

1515 – 1530 Permissiveness of soil microbial communities toward receipt of mobile genetic elements
Sanin Musovic [Denmark] (Auditorium 12)

Evening session

1830 Víctor de Lorenzo, Molecular Environmental Microbiology Laboratory, the Spanish National Research Council, Spain
Conflict management and division of labor in bacterial populations degrading recacitrant aromatics

1915  Stephen J. Giovannoni, Oregon State University, USA
Outliers: Extreme Selection for Minimalism in Ocean Microbial Plankton