Congratulations to Sankalp Arya: International Research Collaboration Award

Congratulations to Sankalp who has received a £2300 International Research Collaboration Award from the University of Nottingham. Sankalp will spend two months (September and October) in Barth Smets’s laboratory at the Technical University of Denmark. This is a really fantastic opportunity for Sankalp to work in one of the leading environmental microbiology groups in the world. His work will focus on developing the iDynomics platform for individual based modelling of microbial interactions to model antimicrobial resistance. Well done Sankalp! And I look forward to visiting Barth’s lab too as part of the project.

 

Alan Perelson’s 70th Birthday Conference: Viral Dynamics: Past, Present and Future

Sankalp and I have just returned from a weekend trip to Santa Fe for the Viral Dynamics conference in honour of Alan Perelson’s 70th birthday.

The conference itself was very high quality – excellent talks throughout from some extremely eminent people in virus research. I particularly appreciated David Ho’s opening talk and Alan Perelson’s closing keynote; David’s talk on HIV dynamics reminding me just how good Alan and Avidan Neumann’s modelling contribution was: it wasn’t about developing big complex models, or doing very fancy mathematics; it was about doing the right simple model to make the most use of the data. Alan’s talk focussed on his earlier work in theoretical immunology – very many interesting examples showing how much you can learn by thinking in mathematical/computational ways.

The best part of the conference was meeting up with people – whether old friends from the short time I spent in LANL (Alan, Jack) and my PhD days (Ruy, Sebastian) – or brilliant people I hadn’t met before with whom I had some very stimulating conversations.

What was also evident was the warmth felt by so many people towards Alan. I only spent 3 months in the lab in 1994 – in between my degree and PhD – and went back for another month in the summer of 1995 – and yet when Ruy Ribeiro sent the invitation I immediately felt that this was a meeting I couldn’t miss. Many people there had collaborated with Alan for many years. And while Alan’s contribution to science is enormous, the plaque that the organizers made for him was for friendship, collaboration and mentorship, with a network graph of his collaborative research outputs. In this, Alan is a positive example for us all.

We went with a poster:

which was Sankalp’s first conference poster presentation! I thought that this would be a good opportunity for him; although Sankalp’s model is about bacteriophage in the context of AMR, while the conference focussed on human disease viruses, the conference attendees mainly worked in mathematical models of virus dynamics. This meant that Sankalp was among people who understood what he was doing and why he was doing it, speaking the same language. Sankalp was busy – he had people speaking with him for the full 2 hours of the poster session – and we received many interesting ideas and suggestions from these conversations.

Nearly new publication: Metal Resistance and Its Association With Antibiotic Resistance. Advances in Microbial Physiology

Last month the review that Sankalp and I contributed to was published on line by Advances in Microbial Physiology. This review was led by Jon Hobman, with considerable writing by Chandan Pal. It is a real honour to have co-authored with the amazing Joakim Larsson. My own contribution was small: Sankalp contributed some review material on modelling, and I got stuck in with Joakim and Jon in the editing phase to ensure we had a coherent story. Overall, this is a very nice and timely review, and we have had a lot of interest in it already. Citation and abstract:

Pal C, Asiani K, Arya S, Rensing C, Stekel DJ, Larsson DGJ and Hobman JL 2017. Metal Resistance and Its Association With Antibiotic Resistance. Advances in Microbial Physiology. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.ampbs.2017.02.001.

Abstract

Antibiotic resistance is recognised as a major global threat to public health by the World Health Organization. Currently, several hundred thousand deaths yearly can be attributed to infections with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The major driver for the development of antibiotic resistance is considered to be the use, misuse and overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals. Nonantibiotic compounds, such as antibacterial biocides and metals, may also contribute to the promotion of antibiotic resistance through co-selection. This may occur when resistance genes to both antibiotics and metals/biocides are co-located together in the same cell (co-resistance), or a single resistance mechanism (e.g. an efflux pump) confers resistance to both antibiotics and biocides/metals (cross-resistance), leading to co-selection of bacterial strains, or mobile genetic elements that they carry. Here, we review antimicrobial metal resistance in the context of the antibiotic resistance problem, discuss co-selection, and highlight critical knowledge gaps in our understanding.