American Society for Microbiology 108th General Meeting

The role of microbiology in the 21st Century

The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) will hold its 108th General Meeting June 1-5, 2008 in Boston, Massachusetts. The meeting will feature over 3,000 individual scientific presentations spanning the breadth of microbiology, and has an expected attendance of 12,000.

Microbiologists study living organisms and infectious agents, and their work is critical to health, agriculture, the environment and biotechnology. Many accomplishments in the microbiological sciences have significantly affected our lives, such as the development of treatments for infectious diseases, the prevention of food spoilage, the use of microorganisms to clean up pollutants and basic knowledge of the nature of all living things.

Among the topics to be presented are:

• The effects of climate change on human health
• New developments in MRSA: Nasal carriage in healthy people and MRSA pneumonia
• The role of normal human flora (native bacteria) on human disease: Has modern medicine ignored them?
• Bats as a source of many emerging diseases
• The vital role bacteria play in the development of new fuels and energy sources
• The effect of globalization on food safety

The opening session of the meeting will examine the role of microbiology in the 21st century, featuring Timothy Donahue of the University of Wisconsin presenting on the use of photosynthetic bacteria to harness the power of the sun for renewable energy and Rino Rappuoli of Novartis Vaccine and Diagnostics examining pan-genomic approaches to the development of new vaccines and antibiotics. The session will conclude with a keynote by Lucy Shapiro of Stanford University entitled ¡§The Bacterial Cell Cycle: A Regulatory Circuit under Temporal and Spatial Control.¡¨