2016 SIMB Annual Meeting and Exhibition

Microbial physiology has been traditionally studied – and exploited for industrial purposes – as monocultures of isolated species. However, in nature these microbes exist as members of diverse communities, where active interactions with other organisms often determine their success or demise. Recently, advances in sequencing, mass spectrometry and imaging techniques have allowed researchers to begin to decipher the communication and metabolic networks by which microbes interact with each other in communities and the mechanisms by which they influence the behavior of their hosts. This session explores the current state of the art in understanding microbial social networks and the latest biotechnological approaches to take advantage of their social behaviour.