2014 - Exploiting bacteriophages for bioscience, biotechnology and medicine (the 5th in a biennial series) - 23rd January 2014

Thursday 23rd January 2014

Cineworld: The O2
Peninsula Square
London
SE10 0DX
United Kingdom

Bacteriophages (phages) are arguably the most abundant biological entities on the planet. They play crucial roles in driving the adaptive evolution of their bacterial hosts, and achieve this both through the predator-prey roles of the phage-bacterium interaction and through the adaptive impacts of lysogeny and lysogenic conversion. Bacteriophages are the source of many biochemical reagents and technologies, indispensible for modern molecular biology. Furthermore, phages are being exploited in other areas of biotechnology, including diagnostics, prophylaxis and other aspects of food microbiology. In recent years there has been a growing interest in developing phages for therapeutic purposes (phage therapy) as natural alternatives to antibiotics. The inexorable rise in the incidence of antibiotic resistance in bacterial pathogens, coupled with the disappointingly low rate of emergence of new, clinically useful antibiotics, has refocused attention on the potential utility of phages for treating human and animal disease. Examples of the roles of phages in fundamental biological research and in medical and industrial biotechnologies will be discussed at this meeting. On registration you will be able to submit your questions to the panel that will be asked by the chair on the day of the event.

This event has CPD accreditation and will have a discussion panel session.

Meeting chair: Professor George Salmond, University of Cambridge, UK

The Deadline for abstract submissions for oral presentation is October 10th 2013. Abstracts for poster presentation only can be submitted up to two weeks before the event. You can download the instructions for authors at www.euroscicon.com/AbstractsForOralAndPosterPresentation.pdf

Talk times include 5-10 minutes for questions

9:00 – 9:45 Registration

9:45 – 10:00 Introduction by the Chair: Professor George Salmond, University of Cambridge, UK

10:00 – 10:30 Talk title to be confirmed

Professor Kerry Chester, UCL Cancer Institute

10:30 – 11:00 Ecological Aspects of Bacteriophage in the Wider Environment

Dr Brian Reavy, The James Hutton Institute, Scotland

High throughput sequencing technologies and metagenomic approaches are revolutionising our understanding of the composition of bacteriophage populations and their potential roles in the wider environment. Much of this work has concentrated on viruses in marine environments and only recently have studies been extended to examine in detail the viruses present in soils. Recent advances will be discussed with an emphasis on how this is framing our view of the roles of bacteriophages as reservoirs of metabollicaly important host genes specific to distinct environments, and how they potentially reflect and affect microbial ecosystem functioning.

11:00 – 11:30 Speakers’ photo then mid-morning break and poster exhibition and trade show

11:30 – 12:00 Talk title to be confirmed
Dr Amin Hajitou, Imperial College Faculty of Medicine

12:00 – 12:30 Temperate phages infecting Pseudomonas aeruginosa in chronic lung infections

Dr Darren Smith, Senior Lecturer in Biology, Northumbria University, UK

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is associated with lowered lung function in gentic disorders such as Cystic Fibrosis (CF), non-CF Bronchiectasis and COPD. There are pathophysiological similarities between these conditions were we will present the differences in phage communities/biology even though bacterial communites present are deemed to be almost identical.

12:30 – 13:30 Lunch, poster exhibition and trade show

13:30 – 14:30 Question and Answer Session

14: 30 – 15:00 Talk title to be confirmed

Professor Colin Hill, University College Cork, Ireland

15:00 – 15:30 Afternoon Tea, last poster session and trade show

15:30 – 16:00 Blocking Cell Signalling with Recombinant Antibodies

Dr John McCafferty, University of Cambridge, UK

16:00 – 16:30 Talk title to be confirmed

Professor David Gally, Division of Infection and Immunity, The Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh

16:30 - 17:00 Chairman’s summing up

 

Registration Website: http://www.regonline.co.uk/bacteriophage2014

 

About the chair

Professor Salmond is currently in the Department of Biochemistry at the university of Cambridge. He graduated in microbiology (BSc, Strathclyde) followed by a PhD in bacterial genetics and phage)host interactions (Warwick) and an MA and ScD (Cambridge). He has taught in Kent, Warwick and Cambridge universities. He has multiple research interests in microbiology, including the molecular basis of bacterial virulence in plant and animal pathogens, quorum sensing, biosynthesis and regulation of bioactive secondary metabolites (including antibiotics), protein secretion systems, and the biology and exploitation of bacteriophages ) the subject of this meeting. He has long standing interests in the isolation of novel phages from the natural environment for the development of genetics and functional genomics of diverse bacteria, including plant, animal and human pathogens. He also has current research interests in how bacteria evade the potentially lethal impacts of viral infection via phage abortive infection systems.

About the Speakers

Brian Reavy is a molecular biologist with an extensive background in virology. After his doctoral studies on viruses of insects at Oxford he worked on foot-and-mouth disease virus genetics at the Animal Virus Research Institute (now Pirbright laboratory). Following a spell in the pharmaceutical industry he moved to the Scottish Crop Research Institute (now incorporated into The James Hutton Institute) where he has studied plant viruses with an emphasis on vectored transmission mechanisms. In the last few years he has started to apply modern molecular techniques to examine ecological aspects of viruses, particularly bacteriophage in soils.

Darren Smith’s postgraduate research has spanned 12.5 yr and has targeted the biology of temperate bacterial viruses and the nano therapy of HIV. Currently he is a Senior Lecturer leading a new but active research group studying the dynamic interplay between Pseudomonas aeruginosa phages and their bacterial host, elucidating their involvement and influence on chronic lung disease. He is the PI of a sequencing facility focusing on viral genomics and host subversion.