News

Mark your calendars! Registration is now open for the Midwest Microbiome Symposium, taking place at Ohio State University from May 12-14, 2025.

Don't miss this opportunity to:

• Hear from renowned keynote speakers Katherine Amato, Cindy Morris, Elizabeth Bess, and Kyle Bibby!

• Explore the latest research in microbiome science highlights

• Network with colleagues and collaborators from across the Midwest

• Have fun! Sign up for a walk, run, trivia night, or trainee social!

Register and submit your abstract by March 31st!

Learn more and register:
Midwest Microbiome Symposium 2025 at The Ohio State University | Center of Microbiome Science

this event is unaffiliated with ITiMS

November 15, 2024

Info and Registration at MAC-EPID.org

The purpose of this event is to stimulate discussion so there will be time for questions after each talk as well as extended breaks and lunch times for further discussions.  A full schedule of events can be found on the event page.  

9:30 AM "Retooling Anaerobic Microbiomes for Waste Carbon Upcycling"

Christopher Lawson, PhD (Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry, University of Toronto)

Introduced by student Renisha Karki.

Prof. Lawson and his team are interested in the biomanufacturing of sustainable chemicals from underutilized “waste” streams using engineered microbial communities (microbiomes). They integrate approaches from microbial ecology, automation, and metabolic engineering to develop synthetic microbial communities for waste-to-chemical conversion and to elucidate basic principles governing microbiome function.

11:00 AM "Hierarchical eco-evo dynamics mediated by the gut microbiome"

Ellen Decaestecker, PhD (Full Professor of Biology, KU Leuven, Belgium)

Introduced by student Alex Song.

Professor Decaestecker's research group, hosted at the KU Leuven Interdisciplinary Research Facility Life Sciences, investigates host-microbiome interactions in different model systems from invertebrates (water fleas, freshwater snails and spider mites) up to (marine) mammals and primates (lemurs and humans).

1:30 PM "The Adaptive Microbiome and Disease Resilience in Amphibians"

Doug Woodhams, PhD (Professor of Biology, University of Massachusetts Boston)

Introduced by student Riley Manuel.

Dr. Doug Woodhams is a disease ecologist working to understand the microbial contribution to immunity and the applications of altering microbiota for conservation and human health. Goals of the Woodhams lab are to effectively manage amphibian chytridiomycosis in a changing environment, to understand mechanisms of resilience to disease at the scales of individual, population, and landscape, and to develop an amphibian model system for mucosal immunity using vaccination and microbiome manipulation.

Chris Adami, faculty of MSU and member of the ITiMS community has written a new book:

The Evolution of Biological Information: How Evolution Creates Complexity, from Viruses to Brains

Why information is the unifying principle that allows us to understand the evolution of complexity in nature

More than 150 years after Darwin’s revolutionary On the Origin of Species, we are still attempting to understand and explain the amazing complexity of life. Although we now know how evolution proceeds to build complexity from simple ingredients, quantifying this complexity is still a difficult undertaking. In this book, Christoph Adami offers a new perspective on Darwinian evolution by viewing it through the lens of information theory. This novel theoretical stance sheds light on such matters as how viruses evolve drug resistance, how cells evolve to communicate, and how intelligence evolves. By this account, information emerges as the central unifying principle behind all of biology, allowing us to think about the origin of life—on Earth and elsewhere—in a systematic manner.

Adami, a leader in the field of computational biology, first provides an accessible introduction to the information theory of biomolecules and then shows how to apply these tools to measure information stored in genetic sequences and proteins. After outlining the experimental evidence of the evolution of information in both bacteria and digital organisms, he describes the evolution of robustness in viruses; the cooperation among cells, animals, and people; and the evolution of brains and intelligence. Building on extensive prior work in bacterial and digital evolution, Adami establishes that (expanding on Dobzhansky’s famous remark) nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of information. Understanding that information is the foundation of all life, he argues, allows us to see beyond the particulars of our way of life to glimpse what life might be like in other worlds.

Link to book on publisher's page

Link to Adami's professional profile at MSU