Edward G. Ruby and Margaret J. McFall-Ngai University of Hawaii, Manoa
The aim of the workshop is to bring together an international group of biologists from a variety of disciplines to consider (i) the extent to which cooperative bacteria influence the biology of animals, and (ii) the mechanisms that underlie the complex beneficial relationships that occur between animal hosts and their native microbiota.
The rigorous study of animal-bacterial interactions is a technology-enabled area, the advance of which relies in large part on the application of recently developed molecular tools. With high throughput sequencing, microarray technology, and direct and indirect methods of examining the genetics of the host and symbiont, we can now approach the study of the persistent, cooperative relationships that animals form with microbial communities. Because of the biomedical bias that stresses the importance of pathogenic bacterial associations with animals, biologists know much more about these unusual conditions than they do about the ubiquitous state of beneficial bacterial colonization. Not surprisingly, this focus has clouded our ability to recognize and characterize how bacteria have influenced the normal biology of their hosts.
This 5-day workshop-conference will consist of individual presentations and group discussions concerning frontiers in the study of cooperative bacterial associations. The workshop will specifically focus on the roles such associations play in the evolution, ecology, and biochemical interactions of the host and its microbial symbionts. The participants will target specific fields for discussion, look for ways to increase collaborative investigations between these different fields of inquiry, and arrive at recommendations for the further development of this emerging discipline.
The participants will also discuss specific outreach projects that will introduce the importance of beneficial bacterial associations to other biologists, students and the general public. The conclusions reached at the workshop will be disseminated to the scientific community through the publication by Cambridge University Press of a book that covers both the scientific proceedings and their broader implications. This volume is specifically devoted to summarizing the present state of our understanding, and the future directions that integrated research should take. Together these activities will contribute to raising the awareness of the current generation of undergraduate, graduate and medical students, as well as the general public, about the vital role played in animal biology by beneficial bacteria interactions.
