3rd ASM Conference on Beneficial Microbes

3rd ASM Conference on Beneficial Microbes

October 25 - 29, 2010
Miami, Florida

The abstract submission deadline is 11:59 PM CST, August 6, 2010. 

Student travel grants are available, with awardees selected based on geographic diversity and abstract quality.

Conference Scope:

Biologists and biomedical scientists are becoming increasingly aware that animals and plants have coevolved with diverse assemblages of microorganisms that are required for normal health and development. Not surprisingly, the activity of these symbiont communities is also likely to profoundly affect all aspects of the host’s physiology and immunology. In addition, a more sophisticated grasp of these normal host-microbe associations is essential if we are to understand what goes wrong when pathogenic ‘interlopers’ disrupt the dynamic stability of the symbiont communities of hosts, including humans. Progress in these areas of investigation requires the application not only of the traditional approaches of biochemistry and genetics, but also of new conceptual models arising from bioinformatics and systems biology.  For example, advances in techniques such as metagenomics and metabolomics have been crucial in predicting the ecology of complex symbiotic communities, the role of metabolic “guilds” in creating community robustness, and the mechanisms underlying the symbionts’ role in disease resistance.  Similarly, the unraveling of the complex networks of metabolic and immune interactions between the microbial community and its host, is only now yielding to the successful application of systems-level analysis and modeling. An understanding of these complex interactions requires contributions from a diverse, multidisciplinary group of researchers, including microbial ecologists and geneticists, immunologists, systems biologists, and clinicians. The goal of this conference is to bring together a wide array of scientific expertise to foster the development of this rapidly expanding field of biology.