Into the Lovely Garden

Conferences are hell, and big conferences are heller, but this one was pretty good. I've just got back from the American Society for Microbiology's 109th General Meeting. It covered all the various flavours of microbiology with hundreds of talks and thousands of posters (ours are available here in case you're interested in what we're up to).

It's too big, they're always too big and you can't see everything that you want to see because things clash or are in meeting rooms so far flung that you miss the beginnings and ends in the trek between. The real trick is to go and see talks that you know nothing about, there will always be more specific meetings in your own field that will be useful for keeping up to date with that, but I tried to liberally sprinkle the talks I was aiming for with random things.

Among my favourites were one on farts from Glen Gibson at Reading University, about gas generation (particularly hydrogen sulfide) by gut bacteria and how this can effect various states of health and how it can be manipulated using prebiotics. I also liked Jessica Green's talk (who looks nothing like she does in that photo, but I'm fairly sure she's the right Jessica Green); she's a hardcore computational ecologist and unlike most of those guys who seem to like counting big fluffy animals or fish, she's attempting to formulate ecological theories that also successfully encompass the main domains of life (I'm not biased), the bacteria and archaea as well. I have to confess that she lost me a bit with her quantum field theory, but it was fascinating nonetheless. Also, her Science paper begins with a Lewis Carroll quote:

And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high, and her face brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size for going though the little door into that lovely garden.

so she wins extra points for that too.

One of the themes running through the meeting was the use of high throughput sequencing data; how to use it, what it's good for, what it isn't good for, problems and comparability. The US bit of the Human Microbiome Project for example, which aims to sequence the bacteria associated with our bodies (90% of the cells in your body aren't human, they're bacterial or archaeal), have generated vast amounts of sequence data already (tens of gigabases), using different sequencing methodologies. Analysing that data is going to be a massive task. I have to confess I missed the session called "the $1 genome" which looked great. Instead we skipped off for a daytrip to New York, booked before I'd seen the schedule. Nevermind, my brain was too full by then anyway.

Open access science was represented by a round table discussion, with live stream and twitter comments and questions from the ustream viewers. The discussion is still available at ustream, and the first section of five is below.



I only caught the last half due to a clash with other talks, but it seemed to be going well. I particularly enjoyed the glee in the convener's voice whenever they got a question from Twitter. Jonathan Eisen, and Chris Condayan were heavily involved in those sessions and are also Open access advocates if you're interested in following them and Rosie Redfield was also there, she runs a completely open lab and her blog is also her lab book. You can see what she's currently working on here.

Ruth Ley and Rob Knight (genius) gave typically amazing talks about microbial ecology, and specifically gut bacteria. Transplanting gut bacterial populations from fat mice to thin mice makes the thin mice fat, even when they are on exactly the same diet and the bacteria in your gut are more highly specialised than those living in any other extreme niche (hydrothermal vents, arctic environments etc.). Rob Knight manages to find ways of analysing microbial population data that are incredibly insightful. I want to borrow his brain, just for a bit, and make a copy.

I'd love to be able to link to the talks, or the posters from various people, but the ASM is a little but recalcitrant about things like that. You can't record your own presentation for example (they're trying to make money out of selling them) and photos were banned in the poster hall. A bit of shame when you consider the amount of work that goes into the presentations and posters that they're not actually useful beyond the four walls of the meeting. Still, we've circumvented that by making our posters available to look at and download - let me know if you have any questions about any of the work, and the ASM, particularly via MicrobeWorld is making great efforts in communicating science more widely.