Boston ASM Meeting Report

This week I am at the general meeting of the American Society of Microbiology (ASM) here in Boston. We are presenting two posters: One is about evolution of ocean microbes at the global scale (“Exploring the Contribution of Neutral Evolution to Biogeography in Global Surface Ocean Microbes Using Agent-Based Modeling”) and another is about aging in bacteria (“From Protein Damage to Cell Aging to Population Fitness in E. coli: Insights from a Multi-level Agent-based Model”). Today I was at a session on "bacterial quiescence", where people talk about phenotypic differentiation of a small fraction of the population, including dormancy, sporulation, lag phase, viable but not culturable (VBNC), not growing metabolically active (NGMA), constant activity stationary phase (CASP), etc. One thing that strikes me is that its all about the heterogeneity. Biology no longer assumes that bacterial populations are homogeneous. This is in stark contrast to our mathematical models, which still treat bacteria as if they were homogenous populations. We are going to need agent-/individual-based models to analyze these data.

Here are links to our abstracts:

http://www.abstractsonline.com/Plan/ViewAbstract.aspx?sKey=927cef45-9ff5-4914-ae99-407ebc5a6a8e&cKey=65246fe7-05b3-4770-9a85-479447a69412&mKey=%7b673511F0-C86B-432F-A387-058032B8500B%7d

http://www.abstractsonline.com/Plan/ViewAbstract.aspx?sKey=c0bdb80c-43a9-4ff2-8a77-3a83c68b0a21&cKey=7af49378-688e-4f12-9ac2-0707246f6ab4&mKey=%7b673511F0-C86B-432F-A387-058032B8500B%7d