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14th – 19th August 2022
The 18th International Symposium on Microbial Ecology (ISME 18) was meant to be held in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2020. However, due to the COVID19 pandemic and associated travel restrictions, this was not to be. After four years of absence and postponements, the ISME18 conference was finally held in Lausanne, Switzerland in August 2022. As usual, the conference was well attended with over 2,000 delegates and several concurrent sessions per day. There were 8 key note addresses, 101 invited talks and over 200 oral presentations and nearly 1,500 poster presentations. Sessions were held on Monday, Tuesday with Wednesday free to explore the beautiful city of Lausanne and then again on Thursday and Friday.
Because of the high interest in plant microbial research, this specific conference introduced three sessions of plant microbial ecology. Each of the sessions had two invited speakers (Dr Valverde Claudio from Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina and Dr Lucy Moleleki from The University of Pretoria, South Africa). There were also three oral presentations and several poster pitches per session. The third session had two invited talks (Dr Alexandria Stoll from entro de Estudios Avanzados en Zonas Aridas CEAZA, Chile and Dr Ashley Shade from Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, USA). In this session, there were three oral presentations, no posters.
As is typical of ISME, many of the talks were focused on microbiomes with the plant section featuring many talks of rhizo- and phyllosphere microbes. There was a strong flavour of how these microbes benefit plants and contribute to crop production as demonstrated through field trials. In addition, there were several studies that sought to enhance our understanding of the interactions between the plant and beneficial or pathogenic microbes, as well as looking at microbe-microbe interactions in the rhizo- or phyllosphere. I would like to highlight two student talks that I found particularly interesting. The first one was presentation by Jessica Dozis INRS, Canada on ‘Plant rhizospheric miRNAs interfere with the microbial use of soil nitrogen’. Another interesting student talk was presented by Yang Liu from British Columbia Canada, the title of the talk was ‘Amino acid availability determines plant immune homeostasis in the rhizosphere microbiome’.
I would like that thank BSPP for the support that made this conference attendance possible.
Lucy Moleleki
FABI
These conference reports are written by the beneficiaries of our travel fund.
Click here to read more about the fund and apply yourself
