2016 CIFAR-IMB General Meeting – Toronto, Ontario

The Integrated Microbial Biodiversity (IMB) Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) held its annual conference for members (and their students) at the Intercontinental Hotel, Toronto, Ontario on June 1-4, 2016. The conference was remarkable, with amazing talks from distinguished scientists from different parts of the world, lively scientific discussions, and sharing of innovative ideas.

Yan was accompanied by Tareq this year. Yan gave a talk entitled "Relatives of Vibrio cholerae pandemic strains can be found in non-endemic areas using a novel culture-independent method," and Tareq presented a poster of his current work entitled "The elusive descendants of the pandemic Vibrio cholerae ancestor: a diverse and dangerous bunch."

Toronto skyline

Commentary on the Local Diversity of Vibrio cholerae in Mexico

Yan's commentary article entitled "Sustained local diversity of Vibrio cholerae O1 biotypes in a previously cholera-free country," is now available in mBio. This commentary is for a recently published study by Dr. Seon Young Choi and colleagues (University of Maryland), also in mBio, on three decades of V. cholerae monitoring from environmental and clinical sources in Mexico. This long-term effort surprisingly found a large number of non-toxigenic V. cholerae strains that are very closely related to the pandemic agents of cholera. Yan speculates that these strains could serve as progenitors for novel toxigenic lineages through horizontal gene transfer in environmental reservoirs. He suggests that widespread and large environmental sampling efforts are needed to detect the presence of these elusive strains, which, incidentally, is exactly what his lab is doing!

Phylogenetic relationships of pandemic V. cholerae strains and their relatives (from Boucher, 2016)

Temporal Distribution of Vibrio parahaemolyticus in the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh

Yan and his colleagues published a paper, "Major tdh+ Vibrio parahaemolyticus serotype changes temporally in the Bay of Bengal estuary of Bangladesh," today in the journal Infection, Genetics, and Evolution. This work was done in collaboration with Dr. Munirul Alam, senior author of the paper, from the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, as well as colleagues from the University of Dhaka and the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Japan. Vibrio parahaemolyticus causes seafood-related gastroenteritis and shows a temporal serotypic shift from predominantly non-pandemic serotypes in 2006-2007 to predominantly pandemic serotypes in 2008, underscoring the need for routine environmental monitoring to prevent V. parahaemolyticus-related diseases.

VIBRIO2016 Conference – Roscoff, France

Greetings from Roscoff!

The VIBRIO2016 Conference concluded today. This conference is the biggest gathering of scientists with one thing in common – their love for vibrios. Current researches on Vibrio cholerae, Vibrio vulnificus, Vibrio fischeri, and other vibrios were presented. Great French wine and Vibrio-free seafood were also very abundant at the conference.

Yan presented a talk about work in the lab on the population structure of natural populations of V. cholerae. Fabini's poster presentation was on a newly characterized Vibrio species, Vibrio cidicii, work he and Yan did with collaborators from the University of Alberta, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC... cidicii. Get it?).

The conference was organized by Dr. Frédérique Le Roux and her lab team from the Station Biologique Roscoff. VIBRIO2017 will (possibly) be held in Chicago, USA.

Vibrio2016 attendees