HMP Consortium - St. Louis Missouri

Human Microbiome Project Consortium – September 2010 – St Louis, Missouri

We received warm welcome messages from Dr George Weinstock and Dr Jane Petersen as well as a humorous welcome from Dr Larry Shapiro, Dean of Washington University Medical School. 

It was wonderful to see so many scientists come together to share the progress on their individual HMP related demonstration projects.  Our own demonstration project with Dr Zhiheng Pei, involving the esophagus microbiome and how that relates to esophageal adenocarcinoma (EA), was quite unique compared to the other projects as we were the only group to focus on the correlation between bacterial population and a form of cancer. 

With over 400 participants and 59 speakers, the conference was quite successful and very interesting.  JCVI Director Dr Karen Nelson did a wonderful job moderating one of the segments.  Dr Roger Lasken also gave a thorough presentation on his lab’s single cell approaches to genomic sequencing of uncultureable bacteria.  Johannes Goll gave a great presentation on his recent work with an open source tool called METAREP (recently published in Bioinformatics 8/26/2010), which is designed to help scientists with analyzing annotated metagenomic data.  And Dan Haft presented his interesting work with algorithmically tuning protein families from reference genomes for systems discovery. 

Overall the conference was quite interesting and informative.  I continue to wish all of the participating sequencing centers, PIs, and others involved with the HMP much success with their projects. 

Hope to see everyone in Vancouver!!!