Kudos: Sonia M. Tiquia

Sonia M. Tiquia, associate professor of microbiology, recently chaired and hosted the Michigan Branch of the American Society for Microbiology’s (MI-ASM) fall meeting, held at the Fairlane Center on Oct 7-8.

More than 150 participants attended the meeting, majority of whom are students from local universities including UM-Dearborn.

The meeting featured a program on the parallel advances biologists are currently witnessing in many research areas of symbiosis and the progress being made in uncovering the nature of symbiotic interactions, i.e., vertebrate-microbe symbiosis, anaerobic methane-oxidizing consortia, marine worms that possess endosymbionts instead of a digestive tract, amino acidproducing endosymbionts of aphids, prokaryotic endosymbionts living within a prokaryotic host within mealybugs, endosymbionts of an insect vector of human disease and a photosynthetic sea slug that steals chloroplasts from algae. These developments promise to provide new paradigms in “Microbial Symbioses and Interspecific Evolution” – the theme of MIASM Fall 2011 meeting. The meeting also featured oral and poster presentations. Four students gave oral presentations and 16 students gave poster presentations.