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4th International Conference on Model Hosts (September 22 – 27, 2017): Danielle A. Garsin

As part of its mission to encourage engagement within the genetics community, PLOS Genetics is sponsoring a number of conferences and meetings this year.  In order to raise awareness about these conferences and the researchers who attend them, we are featuring a number of these conferences on Biologue, with posts written by the organizers, or the PLOS Genetics editors who are involved.

 

The 4th International Conference on Model Hosts will be held from September 22 – 27, 2017 at the Sheraton Rhodes Conference Center in Ixia, Rhodes, Greece and will bring together a multidisciplinary group of leading scientists that explore vertebrate as well as invertebrate models for the study of host responses and virulence. The 4th International Conference on Model Hosts will focus on invertebrate, vertebrate, and amoeboid systems used for the study of host-pathogen interactions, virulence and immunity, as well as on the interplay between these systems and the mammalian models.

An increasing number of scientists from different fields have turned to insects, fish, worms and other model hosts as facile, ethically expedient, relatively simple and inexpensive hosts to model a variety of human infectious diseases, and to study host responses and innate immunity. Because many of these hosts are genetically tractable, they can be used in conjunction with an appropriate pathogen to study host innate immunity. Remarkably, a common, fundamental set of molecular mechanisms is employed by a significant number of microbial pathogens against a widely divergent array of metazoan hosts. Moreover, the immune responses of these model hosts have contributed important insights into our understanding of evolutionarily preserved immune responses.

An increasing number of scientists from different fields have turned to insects, fish, worms and other model hosts as facile, ethically expedient, relatively simple and inexpensive hosts to model a variety of human infectious diseases, and to study host responses and innate immunity. Because many of these hosts are genetically tractable, they can be used in conjunction with an appropriate pathogen to study host innate immunity. Remarkably, a common, fundamental set of molecular mechanisms is employed by a significant number of microbial pathogens against a widely divergent array of metazoan hosts. Moreover, the immune responses of these model hosts have contributed important insights into our understanding of evolutionarily preserved immune responses.

Zebrafish (top), medaka (middle), stickleback (bottom). Image Credit: Pictures taken by Dr. Cristian Cañestro in Dr. John H. Postlethwait’s laboratory (Institute of Neuroscience, University of Oregon). https://doi.org/10.1371/image.pgen.v05.i05.g001

The conference will be held under the auspices of Aegean Conferences, an independent, nonprofit, educational organization directed and managed by the scientific community, which for the past sixteen years has been organizing highly visible conferences, workshops and symposia in several scientific fields (see Nature Immunology: February 2005, March 2006, September 2007, November 2009, October 2013, March 2016). A report on the meeting was published in EMBO reports (2011) 12, 5-7 and is available in EMBO press.

On behalf of the Aegean Conferences and the organizers, we are soliciting funds from corporations interested in attending this non-profit scientific meeting. We are offering the opportunity to support the conference with an unrestricted educational grant, as well as sponsorships of sessions or sponsorships of travel awards for junior scientists. PLOS Genetics will be supporting Early Career Researchers by covering the registration for 2 students to attend the conference.

The topics to be covered during the meeting include:

  • Functional genomics of host/microbe interactions
  • Immune response pathways in model hosts and damage triggered immunity
  • Damage triggered immunity
  • The road less travelled: new and non-traditional hosts
  • Whole animal responses to microbial infections:
  • Microbial communities and their interactions with their hosts
  • Roles of ROS in host response
  • Model hosts in drug and probiotic discovery and development.

The organizers of the meeting are: Alejandro Aballay (Duke University Medical Center), Frederick Ausubel (Harvard University), Arturo Casadevall (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health), Danielle Garsin (The University of Texas McGovern Medical School & Associate Editor at PLOS Genetics), Michael Gilmore (Harvard Medical School), Eleftherios Mylonakis (Brown University), Nathalie Pujol (Centre d’Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and Andreas Vilcinskas (Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology).

Among the confirmed speakers are: Michealis Barkoulas (Imperial College), Rob Britton (Baylor College of Medicine), Andrew Camilli (Tufts University), Angela Douglas (Cornell University), Nathalie Frank (The Scripps Research Institute), Sebastian Fraune (Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel), Oliver Gordon (Reis e Sousa lab, The Francis Crick Institute), Frank Jiggins (University of Cambridge), Juliana Junqueira (Universidade Estadual Paulista), Daniel Kalman (Emory University), Mihalis S. Lionakis (Laboratory of Clinical Infectious Diseases,  National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,  National Institutes of Health), Jonathan Livny (Broad Institute), Andrew Neish (Emory University School of Medicine), Irene Newton (Indiana University), Mairi Noverr (Louisiana State University Health New Orleans), Spencer Nyholm (University of Connecticut), Read Pukkila-Worley (University of Massachusetts Medical School), Irene Salinas (University of New Mexico), Rob Wheeler (University of Maine), Marvin Whiteley (University of Texas at Austin), Lei Zhou (University of Florida).

To find out more about this year’s International Conference on Model Hosts visit the conference website at http://www.aegeanconferences.org/src/App/conferences/view/122

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