ISME Day 4

Today was the last day of ISME and a great conclusion to the conference.  Today’s theme seemed to surround microbial methods and my favorite talks were split between 2 subterranauts, Karen Lloyd and Roland Hatzenpichler.  Karen spoke in the archaea themed session about exploring single cell genomes and exploring novel enzyme function in the uncultured MCG archaea group and  Roland presented in the single cell session about a new technique to visualize newly synthesized proteins in situ.

ISME Day 3

Today was a busy day but, at the end of the day, the one talk that stands out in my mind is Ruth Ley’s talk on the human microbiome.  Personally, I find this topic to be extremely interesting and Ruth’s presentation did not disappoint.  The talk began with an introduction to a phenomenon in human history: the introduction of agriculture.  Now, we can all imagine that during the shift from hunting and gathering to farming the human microbiome changed to adjust to the new diet.  Perhaps one of the most important changes was the introduction of starch heavy foods that were not the basis of hunter-gather diets.  One gene in particular, AMY1, codes for 

ISME Day 2

There were some really cool sessions at ISME today.   The morning started off with a plenary talk by Lars Peter Nielsen about cable bacteria and I sampled the sessions on “Unusual strategies of microbial energy acquisition,” “Network microbial ecology,” and “Meta-ome information to microbial ecology.”  For each session I have picked a favorite talk starting with Victoria Orphan‘s talk on the archaeal-bacterial partnerships responsible for sulfate-coupled anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM).

ISME Day 1

This week I am at the International Society of Microbial Ecology (ISME15) Conference in Seoul, South Korea!  I want to share with you some of my favorite talks from each day.  Today, I spent most of my time in the “Microbiomes of marine ecosystems” session and made some stops at other sequencing related talks.  Perhaps my favorite talk of the day goes to… Antje Boetius!  Her talk focused on the microbial diversity of the surface of seafloor sediment and