Mi­crobe 2018

by Elio

I re­cently at­tended the ASM Mi­crobe 2018 meet­ing in At­lanta and have a short re­port to make. I went to my first such meet­ing as a grad­u­ate stu­dent in 1952 and to many oth­ers sub­se­quently, so this was hardly a new ex­pe­ri­ence for me. One rem­i­nis­cence: At the 1952 meet­ing, there was a din­ner for the at­ten­dees, for which they had to pay. Not hav­ing much money, I skipped that. My re­ward was that I missed com­ing down with a food poi­son­ing out­break that af­fected many of the par­tic­i­pants (the mi­crobes' re­venge?).

Fig­ure 1. Poster ses­sion at Mi­crobe 2018. Source

I don't have a pre­cise count of the at­ten­dees at this meet­ing, but there were many thou­sands. Please don't laugh if I tell you that I thought that the place was full of young peo­ple, per­haps in greater num­ber than be­fore. What could be nicer? I hope it's not just my old age speak­ing.

In re­cent years, 'Mi­crobe' merged to­gether two meet­ings, the tra­di­tional ASM an­nual meet­ing and ICAAC, a con­fer­ence de­voted to an­timi­cro­bial agents and chemother­apy. How does this merger work? I heard var­i­ous opin­ions on this mat­ter, but what I gath­ered from most is that it func­tions quite well. True, the meet­ing is now larger, but each of two pre­vi­ous ones was big any­how, far from be­ing a small, more in­ti­mate con­fer­ence. Of course, an ad­van­tage of the cur­rent arrange­ment is that ar­eas of sci­en­tific over­lap will ben­e­fit from the greater spec­trum of pre­sen­ta­tions. Let me make a gen­eral, if ob­vi­ous, point about this. Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy is be­com­ing ever more an in­te­gra­tive sci­ence and work­ers in tra­di­tion­ally dis­tinct ar­eas speak a com­mon lan­guage and, in­creas­ingly, share a wide range of tech­niques. Con­se­quently, mi­cro­bial ecol­o­gists will now profit from lis­ten­ing to talks by clin­i­cal mi­cro­bi­ol­o­gists and vice versa. Not so in the old days, when each branch of mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy tended to build a de­fen­sive silo for it­self. Al­most.

With hun­dreds if not thou­sands of pa­pers pre­sented it would be silly to try to sum­ma­rize all that tran­spired within the cav­ernous halls of Atlanta's con­ven­tion cen­ter (I was lent an elec­tric  me­chan­i­cal scooter to get around and man­aged not to hit any­body). But I came away with the thought that there was a theme that got spe­cial em­pha­sis. It is what we could call 'mi­crobes in space.' Not that 3‑D mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy is a new topic: see the pro­nounced con­cern for biofilms or com­plex de­vel­op­men­tal struc­tures. But more is be­ing done to in­clude the role of space in many phe­nom­ena be­ing con­sid­ered. Due in good part to the de­vel­op­ment of won­drous tech­niques, the sub­ject is ac­quir­ing a new depth and width. I have in mind such novel ap­proaches as spec­tral imag­ing, as used in the Gary Borisy lab, which al­lows one to de­ter­mine the 3‑D lo­ca­tion of dozens of flo­res­cent dyes, or, as in Di­anne Newman's lab, the hy­bridiza­tion chain re­ac­tion for study­ing com­plex mi­cro­bial spa­tial re­la­tion­ship in the sputa of a pa­tient. These and other stu­pen­dous tech­ni­cal de­vel­op­ments have fos­tered the de­vel­op­ment of a new-sound­ing sci­ence, mi­cro­bial bio­geog­ra­phy.

Not all mi­cro­bial bio­geog­ra­phy de­pends on fancy new meth­ods. See an ex­am­ple, pre­sented by J. P. Bar­raza from Mar­vin White­ley's lab. They wanted to fig­ure out why Pseudomonas aeru­ginosa and Staph aureus can co­ex­ist in the lungs of Cys­tic Fi­bro­sis pa­tients when in the lab pseudomonas kills the staph. Is space an is­sue? So, they grew the two or­gan­isms to­gether in shal­low con­tain­ers, shak­ing one and keep­ing the other sta­tion­ary. Guess in which the staph stayed alive and in which it died? Yes in­deed, in the sta­tion­ary cul­ture the staph lived, in the shaken one it got killed. Un­der the mi­cro­scope, the cells in the sta­tion­ary cul­ture made dis­tinct, sep­a­rate ar­rays, which os­ten­si­bly al­lowed the staph to live away from its killer. What could be sim­pler?

I won't guar­an­tee gems like this one at every ses­sion, but I can as­sure you of a good and in­for­ma­tive time at fu­ture 'Mi­crobes.' But there is more to this it than the sci­ence. You see, we share a lot with our fel­low mi­cro­bi­ol­o­gists. In fact, we be­long to a guild, a point I made ear­lier here but which I would like to re­peat in this con­text. I said then: 'I am in­tensely aware that I be­long to a group of peo­ple united by their par­tic­u­lar pro­fes­sional in­ter­ests. When­ever I meet an­other mi­cro­bi­ol­o­gist for the first time, I feel a high de­gree of affin­ity with him or her. We can im­me­di­ately con­verse about com­mon in­ter­ests, and es­pe­cially about peo­ple we both know. There is usu­ally only one "de­gree of sep­a­ra­tion," two at most, de­pend­ing in part on gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ences… Look­ing into this a bit deeper, I find that this sense of be­long­ing mat­ters a lot to me, and to my men­tal well-be­ing, no less. I have de­rived and con­tinue to de­rive emo­tional sup­port from be­ing a mem­ber of a com­mu­nity of peo­ple joined to­gether by com­mon ex­pe­ri­ences and shared con­cerns.' At meet­ings such as the one I at­tended, such mat­ters come to the fore. I chanced upon old friends and made some new and val­ued ac­quain­tances. It felt good. If you be­lieve me, con­sider com­ing to fu­ture 'Mi­crobe' meet­ings.

Ab­stracts for Mi­crobe 2019 (San Fran­cisco) are now open. Sub­mit yours be­fore Au­gust 3rd, 2018.

And of course, we also recorded a live episode of This Week in Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy with the en­tire TWiM team!