ISME 12 -- Highlights of Tuesday

On Tuesday, Phil Hugenholtz talked about his work in metagenomics of a hypersaline mat in Guerro Negro, Mexico. What makes this project a little different from typical "bulk" metagenomics projects such as the Global Ocean Survey is that the peat-like mat has distinct layers of microorganisms even within a centimeter thick sample and these layers can be separated and analyzed individually. Phil and colleagues analyzed 10 layers of the mat and found distinct differences. Particularly interesting was the overabundance of chemotaxis genes on the oxygenic/anoxygenic boundary, which he explained by the fact that microbes that live near the border have to be able to move into their preferred layer as this boundary shifts over the duration of a day. Phil also looked at amino acid bias between layers, which brought back fond memories of my work in grad school linking amino acid differences to thermostability.

Gene Tyson talked about metatranscriptomics, or metagenomics on transcripts (well, cDNAs anyway). As I have a grant funded (with Andy Allen) to do metatranscriptomics on eukaryotic phytoplankton, I found it interesting (although depressing) that despite all the optimizations to avoid it, still 50% of their cDNAs are rRNA.

I had lunch with Rick Cavicchioli and members of his group as JCVI's field biologist Jeff Hoffman hopes to get me involved in the analysis of the Antarctic lake metagenomics data he is generating in collabioration with Rick's lab.

In the afternoon, I presented my poster on "Large Scale Analysis of Nitrogen Utilization Genes in the Indian Ocean" -- basically a bioinformatic analysis of the GOS II data in the context of several genes involved in organic vs inorganic nitrogen uptake and usage. While I wasn't swamped with visitors, a dozen or so people stopped by and gave useful suggestions.

In the evening we had more keynotes from Roberto Kolter and Norm Pace. Kolter's talk (on the genetics of biofilm production in Bacillus) was really wonderful -- and not just for the knowledge imparted -- Roberto is a truly gifted public speaker, a rarity among scientists.

Norm's talk was the same "don't use the term 'prokaryote'" talk that I've heard twice already. Now don't get me wrong -- I have enormous respect for Norm and even quite a bit of agreement for the meaningless nature of the term "prokaryote", but really, I think nearly everybody in the field has either read his paper on the topic or heard him speak on it at least once. This might be forgiven if Norm was some retired scientist who was no longer is generating any new ideas, but happily Norm and his lab are still quite active -- I think everybody would find talks on new work from his lab much more interesting than yet another version of the same "prokaryote" talk.