SS 2 - Functional Diversity of Microbiomes: Integrating Human Biology and Ecology Towards New Avenues of Analysis August 7, 2017 10:15-1:15 At the ESA 2017 Meeting in Portland, OR
Dear Colleagues, We would like to make you aware of a special session as part of the 2017 the ESA meeting in Portland. As detailed below, the purpose of the session is to bridge microbiome research between ecology and the health sciences. It features two keynote presentations by prominent researchers: Dr. Susannah Tringe, Metagenome Program Lead, DOE Joint Genome Institute David Relman, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, Stanford University Presentations will be followed by a facilitated discussion aimed at identifying the major questions and commonalities among four target areas: human microbiome, rhizosphere microbiome, plant microbiome and community ecology. Therefore, we hope to attract ecologists from these disciplines to contribute to the discussion. For further details, please contact: Pedro M. Antunes Algoma University Biology Department 1520 Queen St E Sault Ste. Marie ON P6A 2G4 Canada antu...@algomau.ca Robert I. Colautti Queen's University Biology Department 116 Barrie St. Kingston ON K7L 3N6 Canada robert.colau...@queensu.ca Session Description: Like many areas of biology, human biology and medicine have benefited from rapid advances in molecular sequencing technology, which are now capable of characterizing microbiomes in unprecedented detail. Increasingly, the field is revealing a staggering taxonomic diversity of organisms in the human microbiome – many of which are new to science. More recently, medical researchers have identified functional roles of microbiome in digestion, immunology and even behavior, which may be analogous to an ‘ecosystem function’ for human health. Plants also host and interact with a complex community of microbes, and for decades ecologists have struggled to understand the effects of plant-microbial associations on plant productivity, fitness and community structure. However, sequencing methods and analyses used in plant microbiome studies lag behind those now common in the medical field. Conversely, human microbiome studies address similar questions about microbial community structure and function that plant community ecologists have investigated since the 1950s. We propose to organize a special session that would bring together human biology and medical researchers, plant community ecologists, and microbial ecologists to foster communication, identify best practices, and propose promising new avenues of analysis. The session will emphasize next-generation sequencing and statistical methods for accurately reconstructing microbiome communities and inferring functional effects. A panel discussion will focus on how the approaches used in one field may be applied in the other.
