ASM Highlights

Jun 13, 2015

This post was originally uploaded to the seagrass microbiome website .

The Seagrass Team (Hannah, Jenna & I) hit up ASM this year which was in New Orleans. In case you missed ASM, Jonathan took the effort to compile all the tweets together (#ASM2015) and his efforts can be found: here.

However in case you don't want to wade though thousands of tweets I've included some some brief highlights:

NCBI's Targeted Loci Blast (MOLE-BLAST)

  • Using MOLE-BLAST you can blast specific 16S or ITS sequences against NCBI currated databases for those marker genes. This seems like it could be really useful if you want to identify bacterial or fungal taxonomy using a marker gene approach. Also, MOLE-BLAST appears to use a tree based approach to help you find the nearest neighbor for taxonomy assignment.

Carl Zimmer's Talk on Microbiomes and the Hyperbolome

The Session that kept Redefining the Tree of Life (aka Unearthing the Dark Matter of Microbial Metabolism and Diversity)

  • Unfortunately, I missed this session, but apparently both Brett Baker (@archaeal) and Laura Hug (@LAHug_) shook things up
  • Brett Baker brought Thorarchaeota to the party, a monophyletic group that looks like it branches between Lokiarchaeota and Eukaryotes
  • Then Laura Hug showed up with Woesearchaeota and Pacearcheoata, not sure where they fit in, but cool

Contributions to “Extreme” Microbiology by Female Scientists Session

  • The whole session was awesome (and extreme), but Emmie de Wit gave a heartfelt (and tear producing) talk on being a first responder to the Ebola outbreak in Liberia
  • Also, I now really want to go to the Bonneville Salt Flats that Betsy Kleba talked about

Honorable mentions: John Zehr (Talk on open ocean Nitrogen fixing symbionts), David Baltrus (Talk on fungal endophytes with bacterial symbionts in their hyphae), Michael Wagner (Talk on syntrophy between nitrite and ammonia oxiders and alternative substrates for nitrification), Tom Marshburn (A real life astronaut!), Tom Sharpton (A Shotgun Metagenome Annotation Pipeline (ShotMAP))

Hannah and I presented posters at the meeting, her poster (left, #1237) and my poster (right, #1236) can be seen below:

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Of course, Team Seagrass wasn't the only ones from the Eisen lab presenting at ASM. David Coil (@davidacoil), Srijak Bhatnagar (@srijakbhatnagar) and Megan Krusor (@MKrusor) also presented posters this year! See tweets with photos below.

Some might say that the real highlight of ASM was New Orleans itself; it was my first time there and I really enjoyed being immersed in the culture (the music!), city and food (especially the food). Below is a picture of me touching the Mississippi River (my first time!). Unfortunately, the water was too murky to search for any seagrass or seagrass relatives.

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