MICROBE 2018 recap - Evolution of Tuberculosis

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So it's Sunday...the meeting started Thursday night. Usually about this time, depending on how ambitious your schedule for the meeting, you are starting to get a little peek'ed and the sessions are starting to run together. For me - a good deal of money is spent coming to these conferences so I have a tendency to pack my schedule. This often times ends in overlapping sessions necessitating a cost/benefit analysis of whether I should risk missing the beginning of the next talk by running to the session after this one or stay in this session and listen to a talk that is perhaps less "soul-on-fire" interesting for me. In either case, you start tapping your coffee IV to make sure it's running only to realize that by this point you've probability built up a super human caffeine tolerance. Yet you still grab that cup and hold it at the morning sessions with such care and possessiveness you would think it a pot of gold.

So major kudos to Caitlin Pepperell and her ability to recapture my attention as my first coffee wore off and I started in on coffee #2. It helps that my next favorite bug - after Vibrio, is Mycobacteria

Evidence I stayed awake...the whole time:

You can decipher my notes above or just read the recap below.

MICROBE 2018 recap - Microbes that Know No Borders - Emergence and Transmission

Dr. Julian Parkhill, Sanger Institute
Signatures of emergence and transmission in bacterial pathogens

Dr. Parkhill has been involved on analysis of transmission and emergence of pathogens for almost 2 decades now. A glance through his publication record shows involvement in epidemic analysis and antimicrobial resistance in Burkholderia, Campylobacter, Neisseria, Legionella, Cholera, Mycobacteria and has assisted in the development of tools and analysis for better visualization and annotation of sequence data, faster phylogenetic analysis, whole genome sequencing, SNPs and AMR, population structure and much more.

Today we looked at Extraintestinal Pathogenic E. coli (ExPEC) and Uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC), and once again we are looking at ST131 in particular as we did in the AMR Highlights blog.

• ST131 clones are said to have emerged in 2000, sequentially acquiring fluoroquinolone resistance followed by beta-lactam resistance (blaCTXM15), rapidly expanded and have remained stable ever since in terms of population size.

But is this really 'emergence'?