Speaker: Ed DeLong
Affliation: MIT, Department of Biological Engineering & Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Title of Public Seminar: "Exploring the marine microbial world, genomes to biomes"
Date: WEDNESDAY, March 25 (thanks Kristen)
Location: 1414 Molecular Biology
Time: 4:10 p.m.
Refreshments: 3:45 p.m. in the Atrium of the Molecular Biology Building
Website of Speaker
Research: Our lab is currently engaged in applying contemporary genomic technologies to dissect complex microbial assemblages. While biotic processes that occur within natural microbial communities are diverse and complex, much of this complexity is encoded in the nature, identity, structure, and dynamics of interacting genomes in situ. This genomic information can now be rapidly and generically extracted from the genomes of co-occurring microbes in natural habitats, using standard genomic technologies.
ISU Contact: Larry Halverson, Plant Pathology, larryh@iastate.edu
Speaker: Ian Lipkin
Affliation: John Snow Professor of Epidemiology, Professor of Neurology and Pathology and Director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University
Title of Public Seminar: "Microbe Hunting in the 21st Century"
Date: MONDAY, April 6
Location: 1414 Molecular Biology (thanks Amy)
Time: 4:10 p.m.
Refreshments: 3:45 p.m. in the Atrium of the Molecular Biology Building
Website of Speaker
Research: Lipkin is the Director of the Northeast Biodefense Center, the Regional Center of Excellence in Biodefense and Emerging Infectious
Diseases comprising 28 private and public academic and public health institutions in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Within this consortium,
his research focuses pathogen discovery, using unexplained hemorrhagic fever, febrile illness, encephalitis, and meningoencephalitis as targets.
He is the Principal Investigator of the Autism Birth Cohort, a unique international program that investigates the epidemiology and basis of
neurodevelopmental disorders through analyses of a prospective birth cohort of 100,000 children and their parents. Lipkin also directs the
World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Diagnostics in Zoonotic and Emerging Infectious Diseases. In 1989, Lipkin was the first to
identify a microbe (Bornavirus) using purely molecular tools. In 1999, Lipkin led the team that identified the West Nile virus in brains of encephalitis
victims in New York State.
ISU Contact: Allen Miller, Plant Pathology, wamiller@iastate.edu
Speaker: Phil Hugenholtz
Affliation: Head, Microbial Ecology Program, DOE Joint Genome Institute
Title of Public Seminar: "Insights into the termite hindgut microbiome using metagenomics"
Date: TUESDAY, April 14
Location: 1414 Molecular Biology
Time: 4:10 p.m.
Refreshments: 3:45 p.m. in the Atrium of the Molecular Biology Building
Website of Speaker
Research: His group is developing methods for analyzing metagenomic datasets and applying them to a number of interesting
communities, including enhanced biological phosphorus-removing and other sludges, termite hindguts, and Lake Vostok accretion ice.
ISU Contact: Drena Dobbs, GDCB, ddobbs@iastate.edu
Speaker: Curtis Suttle, Ph.D., Professor, Associate Dean
Affliation: Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of British Columbia.
Title of Public Seminar: " "
Date: THURSDAY, April 30 (with BBMB)
Location: 1414 Molecular Biology
Time: 4:10 p.m.
Refreshments: 3:45 p.m. in the Atrium of the Molecular Biology Building
Website of Speaker
Research: RNA viruses infect marine organisms from bacteria to whales, but RNA virus communities in the sea remain essentially unknown.
Reverse-transcribed whole-genome shotgun sequencing was used to characterize the diversity of uncultivated marine RNA virus assemblages.
A diverse assemblage of RNA viruses, including a broad group of marine picorna-like viruses, and distant relatives of viruses infecting
arthropods and higher plants were found. Communities were dominated by distinct genotypes with small genome sizes, and we
completely assembled the genomes of several hitherto undiscovered viruses. Our results show that the oceans are a reservoir of previously
unknown RNA viruses.
ISU Contact: Allen Miller, Plant Pathology, wamiller@iastate.edu
Speaker: Jill Banfield, Ph.D., Professor
Affliation: University of California Berkeley; Geochemistry group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Title of Public Seminar: "Metagenomic and proteomic analyses of the structure and dynamics of natural microbial communities"
Date: TUESDAY, May 12, 2009
Location: 1414 Molecular Biology
Time: 4:10 p.m.
Refreshments: 3:45 p.m. in the atrium of the Molecular Biology Building
Website of Speaker
Research: Microorganisms exert fundamental controls on the chemistry of their environments. Their activities are shaped by inter-organism interactions and the geochemistry of their surroundings. My research group studies these processes, primarily by application of new, culture-independent approaches (metagenomics, community proteomics). Our interests include bacteria, archaea, and phage/viruses, ecology, and evolution.
ISU Contact: Kirsten Hofmockel, EEOB, khof@iastate.edu
Also sponsored by ISU ADVANCE Program.
Sponsors: Interdepartmental Genetics; Interdepartmental Graduate Program in Microbiology; Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology; Plant Sciences Institute; F. Wendell Miller Lectures; Center for Integrated Animal Genomics (CIAG); Center for Plant Responses to Environmental Stresses; College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; NSF-IGERT Computational Molecular Biology Training Group and ISU Graduate College.