Jonathan Eisen is a professor at the University of California, Davis Genome Center. Over the course of his career, he has pioneered new ways of sequencing microbial genomes and analyzing them. I talked to Eisen about some of the weirdest creatures he's studied, such as bacteria that only live on the bellies of worms at the bottom of the ocean, and how we may be able to exploit their genomes for our own benefit. We also discussed the new movement for open access to scientific literature, a subject that's a particular passion of Eisen, who is academic editor in chief at the open-access journal PLOS Biology.

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Hazel Barton is the Ashland Professor of Integrative Science at Northern Kentucky. She explores some of the world's most remote caves to study the remarkable diversity of microbes that thrive in their dark recesses. I spoke to Barton about how she first became captivated by these bizarre organisms, what it's like to do delicate microbiology when you're hip-deep in mud, and why she wants to explore caves on Mars in search of Martians.

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Dennis Bray is an active professor emeritus in both the Department of Physiology and Department of Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. He studies the behavior of microbes--how they "decide" where to swim, when to divide, and how best to manage the millions of chemical reactions taking place inside their membranes. For Bray, microbes are tiny, living computers, with genes and proteins serving the roles of microprocessors. In this interview, I talked with Bray about his provocative new book, Wetware: A Living Computer Inside Every Cell.

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Michael Cunliffe is a microbiologist in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Warwick in England. He studies the microbes that live in the thin layer of water at the very surface of the ocean. His research is shedding light on an ecosystem that's both mysterious and huge, spanning three-quarters of the surface of the planet.In this interview, I talked with Cunliffe about the discovery of this sea-surface ecosystem, and the influence it has over the climate.

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Pratik Shah is a graduate student in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, and he?s a 2009 recipient of ASM?s Raymond W. Sarber award, granted to recognize students for research excellence and potential. His research focuses on polyamines and polyamine biosynthesis and transport systems in Streptococcus pneumoniae. He?s studying polyamines with the goal of finding potential targets for pneumococcal vaccines and prophylactic interventions against pneumococcal disease. In this interview, I talked with Pratik about why polyamines may hold the key for new ways to combat pathogens, his plans for the future, and about advice he would give to young people considering grad school.

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Abigail Salyers is a Professor of Microbiology and the G. William Arends Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and her research focuses on the ecology of microorganisms in the human body and the comings and goings of antibiotic resistance genes, particularly genes in Bacteroides species. Dr. Salyers is ASM?s 2009 Graduate Microbiology Teaching Awardee. If you?ve ever tried teaching or mentoring, you know it?s not always easy, but for an eminent scientist, teaching at the undergraduate or graduate level must be incredibly difficult. After all, once you reach a certain level of knowledge in any field, it can be hard to relate your knowledge to people who know relatively little about it. Dr. Salyers has tackled 100-level biology courses with as many as 300 students, taught one-on-one at the lab bench, and been an instructor at an intensive summer course in microbial diversity, all while rising to the top of her field in research. In this interview, I talked with Dr. Salyers about the most influential teacher in her own life (you might be surprised to learn who that is), about whether antibiotic resistance is getting the kind of play it deserves, and about why the baboon vagina is an interesting study system.

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Arthur Guruswamy is a clinical microbiologist in Virginia?s Department of General Services Division of Consolidated Laboratory Services and the winner of ASM's Scherago-Rubin Award in recognition of an outstanding, bench-level clinical microbiologist. His particular interest lies in mycobacterial and fungal diseases, including tuberculosis. In his work, Mr. Guruswamy places a lot of emphasis on helping others. A while back, he traveled to his native Sri Lanka to train clinic staff in the use of a rapid, low tech method for identifying cases of tuberculosis. Using this method has probably saved many lives, since staff Mr. Guruswamy trained can now treat their patients quickly and avoid the three to four week wait for culture results. Mr. Guruswamy is also involved in ASM?s Minority Mentoring Program so he can offer younger scientists the kind of assistance he says he got from other ASM members back at the beginning of his own career, when he arrive in the United States with less than $50 in his pocket. In this interview, I asked Mr. Guruswamy about his work at the state lab in Virginia, about tuberculosis in this country, and about why he saw more unusual clinical cases during his time working at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota than he has during any other phase of his career.

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Dr. Frances Arnold is a professor of Chemical Engineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology (most of us know it as Caltech). Dr. Arnold?s research focuses on evolutionary design of biological systems, an approach she is currently applying to engineer cellulases and cellulolytic enzymes for manufacturing biofuels. This country?s energy security can look pretty bleak when you think about it: the need to address global warming, strife in oil-rich nations, and depletion of fossil fuels combine to paint an uncertain future, and although ethanol has a lot of friends in Iowa and D.C., ethanol isn?t going to end our energy woes. In the future, our energy supply will probably be cobbled together from a number of different fuels and sources. Dr. Arnold is interested in engineering microbes that can grant us a biofuel that packs more of a caloric punch than ethanol. She likes isobutanol, which can be converted into a fuel that?s more like the hydrocarbons we currently put into our fuel tanks. To develop proteins that make the comounds she wants the way she wants, Arnold and her team take a gene that needs tweaking to do the job, introduce directed mutations into it, and select the mutant proteins that do the job best. In this interview, I talked with Dr. Arnold about how she got into alternative energy during the Carter administration (and got out again during the Reagan administration), what she sees in the P450 enzyme, and how she explains her work to people outside her field.

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The Meet The Scientist (MTS) podcast is moving to a new website. MTS can now be found on MicrobeWorld.org. MicrobeWorld is the home of all the video and audio podcasts produced by The American Society for Microbiology. Besides podcasts, MicrobeWorld is an aggregator of the best microbiology related news, images, videos and resources found on the net. MicrobeWorld.org allows registered users to be editors and/or curators of the site. Any action users take, from clicking on an article, rating a news item, to making a comment, has a direct impact on what appears on the front page. If you are a subscriber to the Meet the Scientist podcast and you find your feed is interrupted, please re-subscribe via iTunes or use this RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/meetthescientist - in your podcast player of choice. Please be sure to go to MicrobeWorld.org and create a free profile which will allow you to be an active participant in the MicrobeWorld community. We look forward to meeting and chatting with you at MicrobeWorld.org!

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Stanley Plotkin is Professor Emeritus at the Wistar Institute and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. A renowned vaccinologist, Dr. Plotkin is, perhaps, best known for developing a highly successful vaccine for rubella back in 1968. We are still using the same vaccine 40 years later. Dr. Plotkin has been honored with the inaugural Maurice Hilleman / Merck Award for his lifetime of dedication to vaccinology. For most people, rubella amounts to a bad rash and a crummy week, but for a fetus, the risks from infection are extremely serious. The rubella virus inhibits tissue growth in infected fetuses, often resulting in profound birth defects collectively referred to as congenital rubella syndrome. Dr. Plotkin developed the rubella vaccine in the wake of a rubella pandemic in 1964, during which he estimates that about 1 in 100 women in his home city of Philadelphia came down with rubella. Nationwide, thousands of babies were born with congenital rubella syndrome in the wake of the outbreak. Thanks to the vaccine developed by Dr. Plotkin, rubella has essentially been eradicated in the U.S. and most other developed countries. In many parts of the developing world, efforts are underway to piggy back the rubella vaccine with the measles vaccine to eradicate both of these diseases everywhere else. In this interview, I talked with Dr. Plotkin about the backlash against vaccines for their perceived safety risks, how he would change vaccine policy, and about the rewards of a career in vaccine development.

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Christine Biron is the chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Brown University in Providence, and she focuses her research program on the mechanisms of the innate immune system ? the body?s system of non-specific munitions for fighting off pathogens. Dr. Biron is also a newly elected fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. When a pathogen gets on or in your body, your innate immune system is on the front lines, working against the pathogen is a non-specific manner. In research, the innate immune system got short shrift for a long time, and only in the last 10 or 20 years has the field picked up momentum. Dr. Biron says back when she was in graduate school ?the innate immune system wasn?t thought to be very cool?, but she says the field is fast-moving today, in part because of some major discoveries involving Type-1 interferons, natural killer cells, and an increased appreciation of a wider range of antigen processing cells that link the innate and adaptive immune responses. In this interview, I talked with Dr. Biron about our increasing awareness of the innate immune system, why it?s important to bring microbiologists and immunologists together under one big tent, and why it?s best that a battle between a virus and a host ends not in victory for one and defeat for the other, but in détente.

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Joseph DeRisi is a Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. His research focuses on two distinct areas: malaria and new viral pathogen discovery. Dr. DeRisi is this year?s recipient of the Eli Lilly and Company Research Award, granted in recognition of fundamental research of unusual merit in microbiology or immunology by an individual on the threshold of his or her career. Discovering new viral pathogens seems like exciting work, and DeRisi has lots of ideas for prospecting. In one recent success with their viral microarray, his group recently helped identify the virus responsible for a devastating disease among rare parrots and other birds: proventricular dilatation disease, or PDD, has been recognized for 30 years, but veterinarians didn?t know the cause or how to control it. Now that DeRisi?s group has pinpointed Avian Bornavirus as the culprit and sequenced its genome, therapies and control measures to help both captive birds and birds in the wild can?t be far behind. In this interview, I asked Dr. DeRisi whether he?s interested in putting the microarray approach to virus discovery to work in uncovering the causes of some human illnesses, especially those diseases we suspect might be spread by viruses, but for which we?ve never found a virus responsible. He has some very interesting ideas for where to start. We also talked about his work on identifying the SARS virus, and a new approach in the ongoing fight against malaria. ID3 Podcast Image Provided by James Gathany Courtesy of the CDC.

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Melanie Cushion holds down two jobs: she?s a research career scientist at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and she?s also professor and associate chair for research in the department of internal medicine at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. Dr. Cushion focuses her research on the fungus, Pneumocystis carinii, which is a harmless commensal for most people, but a deadly pathogen for others. Pneumocystis carinii was shrouded in obscurity for many years until its fifteen minutes in the spotlight came in the 80?s, when, unfortunately, an outbreak of Pneumocystis pneumonia prefigured the AIDS epidemic. Large numbers of previously healthy homosexual men in California became deathly ill with Pneumocystis pneumonia, and doctors knew something unusual (later found to be HIV) was going on. Dr. Cushion says Pneumocystis pneumonia is an opportunistic infection: it strikes individuals with immune systems too weak to fend it off. This explains why it was ? and still is ? a well-known sign that the patient is stricken with an active HIV infection or some other immune-suppressing disorder. Dr. Cushion heads up the Pneumocystis genome project and she?s also looking into a new line of drugs called glucan synthase inhibitors, which have a profound effect on Pneumocystis?s life cycle and may offer new insights into managing the pathogen. In this interview, I talked with Dr. Cushion about some of the more surprising results to come out of her genomics work, why Pneumocystis is a tough nut to crack in the laboratory, and about why she?s not giving her young investigator award back to the Society of Protozoologists any time soon.

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Ian Orme is a professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Pathology at Colorado State University, and his research focuses on the immune response to tuberculosis (TB) ? a bacterial disease that most often infects the lungs. He?s speaking at the American Society for Microbiology?s upcoming meeting on Continuing Undergraduate Education (ASMCUE). In the U.S., TB seems like a thing of the past. Here, public health measures and medical care have all but wiped out the threat from this infection. But worldwide, the WHO says there were 9.2 million new TB cases in 2006 alone, and each person with TB infects an average of 10 to 15 people with the TB bacterium every year. These are just some of the reasons Dr. Orme is delivering a talked titled ?Tuberculosis: Why Now Is a Good Time to Leave the Planet? at ASMCUE. He admits leaving the planet isn?t a practical suggestion, but he wants to raise awareness of the disease and he?s not afraid to stir the pot a little. Orme and his group not only study the immune responses to TB bacteria, they?re also following a number of different avenues for developing new vaccines and improving the existing vaccine, BCG (bacille Calmette-Guérin). In this interview, I talked with Dr. Orme about his vaccine work, why he thinks latent TB bacteria aren?t really latent, and how he sometimes feels like the wild-haired radical, cat-calling from the corner of the lecture hall.

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Parisa Ariya is a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and the Chemistry Department at McGill University in Montreal. Dr. Ariya works mostly in atmospheric chemistry, but she has also done a good deal of work with bioaerosols and airborne microorganisms. She will deliver a talk at the ASM General Meeting in May titled Bioaerosols - Impact on Physics and Chemistry of the Atmosphere. Bioaerosols ? microscopic clumps of microorganisms and organic debris ? arise through any of a number of mechanisms. The scientific community has come full circle on the idea of microorganisms in the atmosphere, according to Dr. Ariya. Back in the early days of microbiology it was widely recognized that the air is full of living, breathing microbes, but once our understanding of atmospheric chemistry and physics matured, the roles of microbes in atmospheric processes were marginalized. Thanks, in part, to Dr. Ariya?s work, the activities and functions of bioaerosols are getting new attention. We now know cells in bioaerosol particles can actively metabolize materials at interfaces, and Dr. Ariya says some of her future work will look into the details of these transformation processes and how they impact the atmosphere. In this interview, I talk with Dr. Ariya about how bioaerosols are formed, what they?re doing, and why it isn?t a good idea to use bioaerosols to manage the weather.

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Jeff Bender is a professor of veterinary public health at the University of Minnesota, and his research interests lie in the intersection of animal health and human health, including animal-borne diseases of humans, food safety, and antibiotic resistant pathogens in animals. Dr. Bender will speak on Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in Veterinary Practice at the American Society for Microbiology?s General Meeting in Philadelphia this May. To a microorganism, vertebrates can all look pretty similar. Dr. Bender?s work focuses on pathogens that can make themselves at home in both human bodies and the bodies of our pets and livestock. Outbreaks of bacterial illnesses from meat products are well publicized these days, but the pathogens we have in common with animals don?t just travel in one direction. We humans can pass organisms and diseases to our animals, too. Dr. Bender says pets treated at veterinary clinics, for example, have come down with painful MRSA skin infections they picked up from their owners. Fluffy might become a temporary reservoir of MRSA in your home ? capable of reinfecting you and your family, but the good news is that she probably won?t be a long term carrier of the bacterium. In this interview, Dr. Merry Buckley asks Dr. Bender about MRSA in pets, whether farmers often get sick from animal-borne diseases, and whether he thinks it?s a good idea to ?go organic? when shopping for food. ID3 Podcast Image courtesy of prettywar-stl on Flickr under CC 2.0.

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Jo Handelsman is a professor at the University of Wisconsin, where she?s a member of the Department of Plant Pathology and chair of the Department of Bacteriology. Dr. Handelsman?s research focuses on microbial communities ? their composition, how they?re structured, and how they work. Thanks to her work to improve the quality of undergraduate education, Dr. Handelsman is this year?s recipient of the American Society for Microbiology?s Carski Foundation Undergraduate Teaching Award. Dr. Handelsman has been at the cutting edge of microbial science for years. After a long time spent studying the teeming communities of microorganisms that dwell in soil, Handelsman has pared down her focus to some arguably simpler neighborhoods: the guts of insects. Handelsman applies molecular methods to identify the strains and genes present in bug guts and combines this knowledge with other information about these environments to learn what these communities might be doing. Handelsman also takes a particular interest in science education, and along with her colleagues Sarah Miller and Christine Pfund, she recently co-authored Scientific Teaching, a book that outlines a dynamic research- and results-driven approach to teaching college-level science. In Dr. Merry Buckley's interview with Dr. Handelsman, they discuss about why microbiologists have a responsibility to educate almost everyone, why bacterial communities in the guts of gypsy moths might need genes for antibiotic resistance, and why and how bacteria inside of insects communicate. They also talk about the underrepresentation of women in academic research appointments and about how universities need to change to make these jobs both more available and attractive for all those brainy women who won?t (or can?t) make the jump from graduate school to academic research.

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David Knipe is the Higgins Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical school. A virologist, Dr. Knipe focuses his research efforts on the herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2) ? the virus we have to thank for genital herpes. An astonishing 20% of Americans have been infected with HSV-2, and whether they?ve had a recognizable outbreak of sores or not, they can still carry the virus. Once you contract the HSV-2 it lays low in your nerve cells, waiting for the right moment to create watery blisters that eventually burst and release more virus particles. Dr. Knipe is interested in how the cells lead these two, very different lives: quiet and quiescent inside the nerve cell and loud and lytic in the epithelium on the surface of the body. Genital herpes is no picnic, but the effects of HSV-2 infection are worst in people with depressed immune systems and in newborns; babies who pick up the virus during birth may suffer from neurological damage, brain damage, or even death. There is no cure for genital herpes, and no means of getting rid of HSV-2, only ways of managing outbreaks. But there is some hope of relief; Dr. Knipe?s lab has developed a vaccine that will enter the trial phase soon. In this interview, I asked Dr. Knipe about how he got interested in viruses, about the vaccine he?s developed and who could hope to benefit from it, and why it?s taken science so long to develop a vaccine for this extremely common disease.

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Andrew Knoll is the Fisher Professor of Natural History in Harvard University?s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, where he studies ancient life, its impacts on the environment, and how the environment, in turn, shaped the evolution of life. In recognition of the 200th anniversary of Charles? Darwin?s birth and the 150th anniversary of the first printing of his book, ?On the Origin of Species,? the American Society for Microbiology has invited Dr. Knoll to deliver the opening lecture, titled ?Microbes and Earth History,? at the society?s general meeting in Philadelphia this year. Before the dinosaurs, before trees and leaves, before trilobites, there were microbes. Vast, slimy layers of them covered the rocks and peppered the seas of the harsh, alien planet we now call Earth. Those slimy cells were our ancestors, and they played a defining role in changing that once-barren moonscape into the world we see today: a planet covered with diverse, striving life, topped by an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Dr. Knoll says he puts on his paleontologist?s hat and studies the fossil record to learn more about this ancient life, then he dons his geochemist?s hat to reconstruct Earth?s environmental history from the chemical signatures he finds in ancient sedimentary rocks. He weaves these two stories together to figure out how life has transformed the planet and how the planet has influenced the course of evolution. In this interview, Dr. Merry Buckley talks with Dr. Knoll about what early earth must have looked like, his involvement with the Mars rover project, and how intelligent design concepts may well belong in high school curricula, but not in the context of science class.

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Roberto Kolter is a professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kolter?s research interests are broad, but he says his eclectic program boils down to an interest in the ecology and evolution of microbes, bacteria in particular, and on how these forces operate at the molecular level. Although he?s worked in a number of different systems, lately Dr. Kolter is spending a lot of time with Bacillus subtilis, a modest little bacterium that doesn?t get the headlines of a wicked pathogen like Salmonella or a useful industrial workhorse like yeast. What it lacks in notoriety, B. subtilis makes up for in usefulness. According to Dr. Kolter, B. subtilis is an important source of industrial enzymes, as in laundry detergent, and, as a bacterial model, a prolific source of information on how some bacteria make spores and other diverse cell types. This ability to form different kinds of cells is intriguing to Dr. Kolter: B. subtilis cells can wear any of a number of different hats, depending on what is needed at any given moment. From spores to swimming cells to cells that wage chemical warfare on their neighbors, B. subtilis can do it all. Dr. Kolter and his colleagues are looking at the how and the why of this multiplicity. In the interview, I talked with Dr. Kolter about what he finds interesting about B. subtilis, why we should start thinking about bacteria as multicellular organisms, and how he got involved in producing a book of poetry - poetry about microbes, that is.

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Dr. Ellen Jo Baron is a professor of pathology and director of clinical microbiology at Stanford University?s medical center in Palo Alto, California. A co-author of the authoritative Manual of Clinical Microbiology, Dr. Baron and her staff in the clinical lab evaluate and advise in the development of new diagnostic technologies. Dr. Baron has also volunteered her time as a microbiology advisor in numerous hospitals and clinics in developing countries since 1996. In a hospital, you have to be able to diagnose infections in order to treat patients, but hospitals in the developing world that are forced to get along with inadequate and ill-equipped microbiology labs have to treat infectious disease blindly, without full knowledge of which organism is to blame and which drugs will be most effective. These missteps cost lives. Dr. Baron, who normally works in a modern, fully-equipped western hospital, travels to hospitals and clinics in places like Cambodia and Nepal to train staff and organize clinical microbiology labs. She says it?s not always feel-good work for her: cumbersome bureaucracy and lack of money and equipment are constant challenges. But experiencing other cultures and getting out of her comfort zone help make the work rewarding. In this episode, Dr. Merry Buckley talks with Dr. Baron about her work at home and abroad, the kinds of problems she faces in under-resourced labs, and about how, as a result of her work in the developing world, she now knows more about sheep and goats than she ever really wanted to know.

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Elizabeth Edwards knows that nothing is simple or easy when it comes to cleaning up toxic waste, but Edwards, a professor of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry at the University of Toronto, is looking for ways to harness microbes to do our dirty work for us. Dr. Edward?s research focuses on the biodegradation of chlorinated solvents in the environment ? the means by which microbes can actually make a living by eating our noxious waste. Chlorinated solvents like trichloroethylene (TCE), perchloroethylene (PCE), and others, have a sordid history in the environment. They have long been used as degreasers and dry cleaning fluid, but before there were regulations about how to handle waste, manufacturers and dry cleaners dumped old, dirty solvents in evaporation ponds or out the back door of the facility. Some of the fluid dumped this way evaporated, but since chlorinated solvents are both dense and recalcitrant, much of the liquid seeped straight down to the groundwater. And stayed there. Among other projects, Dr. Edwards is looking at the ability of mixed cultures of bacteria to break down these solvents in a step-wise process, with the expectation that we?ll eventually be able to treat the contamination at some sites with injections of microbes. In this interview, I talked with Dr. Edwards about why chlorinated solvents are such a difficult environmental problem, how working in environmental consulting for a time helped her realize where she wanted to focus her research, and why we might have to make some tough decisions when it comes to cleaning up the hundreds (thousands?) of solvent-contaminated sites in North America. Dr.Edwards will be speaking at ASM?s 109th General Meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania which will take place from Sunday, May 17 to Thursday, May 21, 2009. please visit the General Meeting website to register for the meeting, view the preliminary program, or reserve your hotel stay

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If you or someone you care about has ever had an antibiotic resistant infection, you know how dire that situation can be. Stuart Levy, a professor of microbiology at Tufts University in Boston, has centered his research around the theme of antibiotic resistance and he says there are few antibiotics in the pipeline for use on that inevitable day when our current infection-fighters are finally overcome. Dr. Levy is delivering the keynote address at ASM?s Biodefense and Emerging Diseases Research Meeting in Baltimore in February. Antibiotic resistance may not be making big headlines these days, but that?s not because the threat is any less serious than before. Levy says he first became interested in antibiotics as a child, when he watched a course of antibiotics heal his twin brother, who suffered from an infection. Later, as a researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, he learned that bacteria can swap around the ability to resist antibiotics, and that failing to manage a small problem with resistance can have some serious consequences down the line. In this interview, Dr. Merry Buckley talks with Dr. Levy about his upcoming keynote address at the biodefense meeting, what antibiotic resistance has to do with biosecurity, and about why you should leave those bottles of antimicrobial soap on the shelves at the store.

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Dr. Paul Keim is a professor of biological sciences at Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff, where his research program focuses on microbial forensics and the genomic analysis of pathogenic bacteria. As an expert in Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium responsible for anthrax, Dr. Keim participated in the FBI?s investigation into the anthrax letter attacks back in 2001. Dr. Keim?s interest in microbial forensics arose out of his postdoctoral work at the University of Utah. After this training in phage recombination and genomics, D. Keim applied what he had learned about bacterial genetics in a collaboration with scientists working on resolving and identifying the various strains of B. anthracis. Fast forward to this past summer, when the F.B.I. revealed that Dr. Keim used his expertise on B. anthracis to help in the investigation that concluded a researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) perpetrated the anthrax attacks. Dr. Keim, along with several other scientists who helped in the F.B.I.?s investigation, will be speaking at ASM?s Biodefense and Emerging Diseases Research Meeting in Baltimore in February, where they?ll present the facts about their contributions to the criminal investigation. In this podcast, I talked with Dr. Keim about his work with the F.B.I., whether the payoffs of bioterrorism research are worth the costs, and about how the plague (yes, the Black Death) made its way to North American shores and continues to sicken about a dozen people every year.

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Dr. Kathryn Boor is a professor and chair in the Food Science department at Cornell University, where she is director of the Food Safety Laboratory - a biosecurity level 2 laboratory that facilitates research on foodborne pathogens. Her particular research interests lie in the "how" and "why" of pathogens and spoilage microbes in food. Boor is also the director of the Milk Quality Improvement Program - a program funded by New York state to monitor and make recommendations to improve the quality of milk in the state. When we think about the way dairy products come to be on the shelf in my grocery store - farmers use machinery to extract milk from an animal that lives in a barn or a field; the milk is piped through long tubes to a tank on a truck that conveys the product to a plant that processes and divvies it up; the bottles and packages are put on another truck and carted to the store - it seems like a wonder dairy is ever safe to eat. But dairy is safe: CDC data indicate that less than 1% of foodborne illness outbreaks in the U.S. involve dairy products. Dr. Boor's primary interest lies in Listeria monocytogenes, one of the few pathogens that is a problem in dairy, and most people who've heard of it associate it with unpasteurized soft cheese or cold cuts. Listeriosis is not as common or familiar as some other foodborne illnesses, but it is more often fatal than salmonellosis or botulism, and in a pregnant woman even a mild case can be deadly for her fetus. Dr. Boor's research focuses on how this so-called "simple" organism is able to persist in some foods and overcome the stress of refrigeration and stomach acid to not only survive, but to make us really sick. In this interview, Dr. Merry Buckley asks Dr. Boor how she came to this particular niche in science, whether pasteurization is any better than keeping milk from getting contaminated in the first place, and what her trained eye for food safety looks out for when she's buying food.

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Moselio Schaechter, known as Elio to his friends, is Distinguished Professor of Molecular Biology and Microbiology, Emeritus, at the Tufts University School of Medicine, and he is currently an adjunct professor at San Diego State University and at the University of California at San Diego. Dr. Schaechter has had a long career in bacteriology and has authored or co-authored a number of text books, and is a former president of the American Society for Microbiology. He lives in sunny San Diego now, where he lectures, attends meetings, and writes his blog, Small Things Considered.If you want an example of the ways the internet has changed public discourse, look to the blogs. After all, and how many blogs did you read 10 years ago? Blogs give authors a bullhorn free from profit-driven publishers, provide people with ideas, and even build communities through reader discourse. To be sure, not every blog is interesting or even readable, but there are many bloggers out there working hard and stimulating some profound discussions. Those of us interested in the life microscopic are lucky to have Dr. Schaechter, who muses on the topics of interest to him and acts as host to other eminent scientists who write guest essays. With Small Things Considered, his goal is to express his own interest in various subjects while encouraging interest in others and kindling conversation and debate. In my interview with Dr. Schaechter, we talk about what he gets out of being a blogger, what makes for a successful blog, and about how mushroom hunting in xeric Southern California usually involves a lot of hunting and few mushrooms. Blogs and Websites mentioned in this episode include: *Small Things Considered *The Loom by Carl Zimmer *Esos Pequenos Bichitos *Le blog des bacteries et de l'evolution *Aetiology *Microbiology Bytes *The Registry of Mushrooms in Works

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Joel Sussman, Ph.D. is a professor of structural biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. In his research, Dr. Sussman is interested in elucidating the structures and functions of proteins, particularly those involved in the nervous system. He is also the lead scientist behind Proteopedia ? a new online protein structure encyclopedia. Scientific endeavors have historically been a one-way street - an investigator or lab makes a discovery, then delivers the good news to the rest of the community via publication. Nowadays, computers and the internet are enabling easier and more seamless means of collaboration and communication. Proteopedia, with which Dr. Sussman is greatly involved, automatically gathers and compiles information from multiple curated sources of information, but its more revolutionary side is the wiki tool, which enables registered users to contribute information themselves. In this interview with Dr. Sussman, I talked with him about his work with acetylcholinesterase and intrinsically unstructured proteins, and about Proteopedia ? how it works and about the possibility of misinformation making its way onto the site. There is also a video supplement that shows Proteopedia in action. It is narrated by Eran Hodis, the graduate student, who, together with Professors Jaime Prilusky and Joel L. Sussman developed Proteopedia at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

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This is a video supplement to the audio podcast of Meet the Scientist episode 13 in which I interview Joel Sussman, Ph.D., a professor of structural biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. The video shows Sussman's Proteopedia.org in action. It is narrated by Eran Hodis, the graduate student, who, together with Professors Jaime Prilusky and Joel L. Sussman developed Proteopedia at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

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Nancy Keller is a Professor of Bacteriology and Medical Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A mycologist, Dr. Keller works with a genus of fungi called Aspergillus ? many of which are potent plant and human pathogens that produce deadly mycotoxins. Her research focuses on finding those aspects of Aspergillus species that make them effective as pathogens and toxin factories. Tiny fungi cause big problems for agriculture and human health, and the U.S. alone spends millions of dollars every year to fight the fungi that attack crops. Aspergillus fungi, in particular, cause a problem for crop plants themselves, but the bigger concern is the mycotoxins they produce: aflatoxin is one of the most potent naturally-occurring toxins ever discovered. What?s more, aflatoxin and other Aspergillus toxins are carcinogenic. The bottom line? Exposure to large amounts of these fungal toxins can kill you quickly, and exposure to small amounts can kill you slowly. On this episode, I talk with Dr. Keller about her work with Aspergillus, why we don?t even know how big the fungal toxin problem is, how reproduction and toxin-making are linked in these fungi, and how we may eventually use viruses as weapons against pathogenic fungi.

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Daniel Lew is a professor of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology and of Genetics at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. His research program focuses on cell cycle control in yeast, and how the cell cycle interacts with cell polarity. Yeast cells may look simple, but inside every little single-cell package lurks an intricate creature that senses and responds cunningly to its surroundings. Dr. Lew has uncovered many of the secrets of the tiny yeast, and since yeast bear a striking resemblance to human cells, some of these facts could help us eventually conquer our own problems with the cell cycle, including cancer ? a kind of cell division gone wild. On this episode, Dr. Merry Buckley talks with Dr. Lew about how a yeast cell knows when to say ?when? during budding, why he studies yeast at a medical school, and where his hard-to-discern accent really comes from (hint: it?s not a North Carolina accent).

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Tony Maurelli is a professor of microbiology and immunology in the F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Maurelli?s major research interest lies in the genetics of bacterial pathogenesis ? the genetic nuts and bolts of how bacteria infect humans and make us sick. Dr. Maurelli?s work has uncovered ?antivirulence genes? in Shigella flexneri, a major cause of dysentery and food borne illness. This is an interesting concept: antivirulence genes undermine pathogenicity, so they must be broken or dropped from the genome for a bacterium to take good advantage of a host and cause disease. These genes are a hindrance, so to become an effective pathogen, Shigella must stop using them. In this interview, Dr. Merry Buckley talks with Dr. Maurelli about antivirulence genes, whether the naming system for bacteria should be fixed, and his favorite microbe.

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Stanley Falkow is a professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the Stanford School of Medicine. His research interests lie in bacterial pathogenesis ? how bacteria cause infection and disease ? and over the course of his career he has contributed fundamental discoveries to the field. Falkow received the Lasker prize this year for special achievement in medical science, and the Lasker Foundation calls him ?one of the great microbe hunters of all time?. Molecular techniques (methods of analysis that rely on bacterial DNA) are now widely used for infectious disease diagnosis, thanks in large part to Falkow, who was among the first to apply an understanding of genes and virulence determinants to analyzing patient samples. He has published extensively in areas ranging from antibiotic resistance to food borne illness to microarrays. In this interview, Dr. Merry Buckley talks with Dr. Falkow about his prescient concerns about the dangers of using antibiotics as growth promoters in livestock, why Salmonella is so good at making you sick, and why students who are interested in science should follow their passion. From this point forward, MicrobeWorld listeners should be caught up with the "Best of" Meet the Scientist to date. Episodes will now come out on the regular Meet the Scientist schedule which is approximately every two weeks.

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Bruce Rittmann, the Director of the Center for Environmental Biotechnology at the Biodesign Institute of Arizona State, focuses his efforts on reclaiming contaminated water and producing renewable energy using microbes. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004 and credited with pioneering development of biofilm fundamentals and contributing to their widespread use in the bioremediation of contaminated ecosystems. His research combines many disciplines of science, including engineering, microbiology, biochemistry, geochemistry and microbial ecology. Formerly with Northwestern University, Rittmann is also a leader in the development of the Membrane Biofilm Reactor, an approach that uses bacteria to destroy pollutants in water. The Membrane Biofilm Reactor is especially effective for removing perchlorate from drinking water, and it is being launched commercially. In this podcast, Merry Buckley talks with Dr. Rittmann about the biofilm reactor process, the electricity hiding in our wastewater, and how we may some day grow fuel on the roofs of buildings.

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Brett Finlay is a professor in the Michael Smith Laboratories, and the Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Microbiology and Immunology at the University of British Columbia. His research program focuses on E. coli, how it interacts with the cells of the human gut, and mouse models of E. coli-like infections. Dr. Finlay will speak at the conference on Beneficial Microbes in San Diego this October, where he?ll describe the results of some of his latest research, which examines how E. coli infections effect the microbes that live in our guts. Sadly, outbreaks of Escherichia coli infections in this country are common ? just this summer a huge E. coli outbreak in Oklahoma sickened nearly 300 people and sent 67 of them to the hospital. Clearly, in an outbreak, not everyone is effected equally. When lots of people are exposed to E. coli, why do some of those people walk away unharmed while others wind up in the I.C.U.? Dr. Finlay would say part of the answer, at least, probably lies in which microbes live in our intestine. In this podcast, I talked with Dr. Finlay about why we have so many different kinds of microbes in our guts, what happens to them when E. coli strikes, and why we have a long way to go before probiotics offer help ? and not just hope.

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David Relman is a Professor of Medicine and of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University, and his research program focuses on the human microbiome ? the microbial communities of bacteria, viruses, and other organisms that thrive on and in the human body. Since Louis Pasteur first deduced that microbes are to blame for infectious disease, doctors and scientists alike have mostly seen infection as warfare between a pathogen and the human body. Dr. Relman sees things a little differently. To him, the complex communities of microbes that line our skin, mouths, intestines, and other orifices are also involved in this battle, interacting with pathogens and with our bodies, and these interactions help determine how a fracas plays out.In this interview, Dr. Merry Buckley asks Dr. Relman about our personal ecosystems of microbes, whether we?ll ever be able to understand and predict what these communities do, and about the sometimes distressing effects of oral antibiotics on our guts. They also talked about whether being MTV?s Rock Doctor back in the 1990?s had an impact on his other professional pursuits.

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Ute Hentshel is a professor of chemical ecology at the University of Würzburg in Germany. Her research focuses on characterizing the microbial communities associated with marine sponges, the diversity of these symbionts and their activities. On this episode, Dr. Merry Buckley talks with Ute Hentschel about her research on the microbes that live on and in sea sponges ? those squishy, colorful residents of coral reefs. Dr. Hentschel describes some of the utterly unique microbes that are only found in sponges, what those microbes get from living in a sponge hotel, and why it?s nice to have a study site in the Bahamas.

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Seth Darst is a professor of Molecular Biophysics at the Rockefeller University in New York city, where his research centers on RNA polymerase, the enzyme at the heart of a cell?s ability to make protein from a set of DNA instructions. In this interview, Merry talks with Dr. Darst about how he got his start in research, whether computers will eventually be able to predict complex protein structures, and why eager young scientists shouldn?t miss their chance at postdoctoral training.

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Ralph Tanner, a professor of microbiology at the University of Oklahoma, focuses his research on anaerobes in the environment and putting those bacteria to use in industry. He develops useful microbial catalysts for biofuel production from sustainable crops and has extended our knowledge of microbial diversity by isolating a number of new genera and species with novel physiologies. He helped define the phylogeny of bacteria. In this podcast, I talk with Dr. Tanner about his work producing biofuels from burnt plant material, the future of biofuels in the U.S., whether bacterial systematics might be forced to change in light of new research on recombination, and about his approach to teaching microbiology.

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