The third John Innes-Rudjer Bošković Summer School in Applied Molecular Microbiology
September 23rd 2010
The third John Innes-Rudjer Bošković Summer School in Applied Molecular Microbiology was held at the Inter-University Centre (IUC) in Dubrovnik, Croatia in the last week of August with the title “Microbial metabolites: signals to drugs”.
Like its two predecessors, the course covered new developments in the study of microbial metabolites, this time with an emphasis on their roles in nature as signalling molecules in natural habitats and on how an understanding of metabolites in nature can help to reveal novel compounds that may find applications in the fight against the increasing menace of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.
Nearly all the participants on the summer school were graduate students and post-docs and represented 23 nationalities working in 18 countries, from Argentina to China, Scotland to Ukraine.
Professor Sir David Hopwood, FRS, John Innes Emeritus Fellow, is co-director of the summer schools with Julian Davies of the University of British Columbia, and Mervyn Bibb and Govind Chandra of JIC are lecturers on the courses.
Their special contribution was a unique feature of the summer schools: hands-on computer workshops on the annotation of microbial genomes and the analysis of antibiotic gene clusters, many of them “silent” under standard culture conditions but capable of revealing novel molecules when activated by the manipulation of genetic regulators or by changes in culture conditions. This research at the John Innes Centre, an institute of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, is part of the drive to uncover novel antibiotics and therapeutics to counter the growing threat of antibiotic resistance.
The fourth summer school will be at the IUC in August 2012 - see http://www.jic.ac.uk/science/molmicro/summerschool
