KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Silvia Bulgheresi
Silvia Bulgheresi is Associate Professor in Environmental Cell Biology at the University of Vienna. She studies how bacterial symbionts of animals grow and divide.Among them are multicellular longitudinally dividing bacteria that live attached to the palate of mammals, including us. Their peculiar cell biology will be the subject of her talk.
Andres Floto
Andres Floto is Professor of Respiratory Biology in the Molecular Immunity Unit of the University of Cambridge (based at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology), Co-Director of the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine (CCAIM), Research Director of the Cambridge Centre for Lung Infection at Royal Papworth Hospital, and Director of the UK Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Innovation Hub. His basic research is focused on understanding how macrophages interact with bacteria, how bacteria evolve during chronic infection and transmission, and how forward and reverse genetics can be combined with fragment-based drug discovery to develop novel antibiotics and host-directed therapies. His clinical research is centred around treating Nontuberculous Mycobacteria (NTM), tackling chronic inflammation in CF and non-CF bronchiectasis, using graph-based machine learning to understand and predict pulmonary exacerbations, and applying deep learning methods to provide individualised clinical forecasting for patients with CF. Clinically he specialises in the management of Nontuberculous mycobacteria, Cystic Fibrosis, non-CF bronchiectasis, and recurrent chest infections.
Bruno Lina
As a consequence of the SARS CoV-2 emergence in December 2019, an unprecedented worldwide surveillance effort has been conducted to monitor the circulation of the virus, with an open and rapid sharing of data. This allowed to the close monitoring of the circulating viruses during the different waves of the pandemic. The (often) retrospective analysis of the molecular and antigenic evolutions associated to mutations providing new virus linages with better fitness and/or partial immune escape provided for the first time an accurate description of the evolution of a pandemic virus in the 2 years following its emergence. Deciphering the evolutionary pathways may provide clues to understand the future directions this unpredictable virus may use.
Christine Moissl
The human microbiome plays an important role in health and disease. Besides bacteria, the human surfaces are inhabited by other microorganisms, like viruses, fungi and archaea. However, due to methodological reasons, in particular, archaea are often overlooked. In this talk, I will summarize our current knowledge on the human archaeal community (the “archaeome”), based on a resource of more than 1000 archaeal genomes from human gastrointestinal tracts. More specifically, I will discuss the role of archaea in high methane producers, and their connection to diet and formate concentrations in the gut. With our data, we show that the human archaeome is a critical component of the gut microbiome, with important impact on the host.