ASLO 2015: Contribute to Session 75

The Aquatic Sciences Meeting will be held on February 22-27, 2015, at the Congress and Exhibition Centre in Granada, Spain. The meeting theme is "Aquatic Sciences: Global and Regional Perspectives – North Meets South".

Abstract submission is now open and we would encourage you to submit your contribution to session 75 "Marine Microbial Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, and Biotechnology"
The genomic revolution is transforming our understanding of marine plankton ecosystems. There is also massive potential for biotechnological innovation without overharvesting the marine environment. Projects such as the EU-funded Micro B3 project (Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biotechnology, www.microb3.eu) are aiming to bring about major developments in the field of environmental bioinformatics to support the ecological and evolutionary understanding of marine microbial ecosystems and to exploit their novel properties for biotechnological applications. The session will showcase how current sequencing technologies can efficiently generate big data within a tractable environmental context, allowing the creation of integrated knowledge to inform marine ecosystems biology and modeling. Moreover, we will encourage examples showing how such approaches can facilitate detection of candidate genes that can be explored by targeted laboratory experiments for biotechnology and for assigning potential functions to unknown genes. Issues related to the intellectual property agreements required for the protection and sustainable use of pre-competitive microbial genetic resources and their exploitation in high potential commercial applications are also encouraged. To underline the translational character of microbial oceanographic research, outreach and training activities aimed at diverse stakeholders, as well as activities related to the Ocean Sampling Day initiative, will also be addressed.

By bringing together these cutting-edge topics we aim to stimulate discussions on the future of collaborative marine microbial research.

Please feel free to pass this information on to any of your students or colleagues who might be interested.
Remember the deadline for abstract submissions is 6th October 2014 (http://sgmeet.com/aslo/granada2015/).

Looking forward to seeing you in Granada,

Frank Oliver Glöckner (MPI-Bremen & Jacobs University Bremen, Germany)
Chris Bowler (Institut de Biologie de l'Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, France)
Linda Amaral Zettler (Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, USA)