Conference: 2024 Microbial Stress Response GRC and GRS: Dealing with the Unknown: Bacterial Stress Responses Across Time and Space

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This award supports the 2024 Gordon Research Seminar and Conference on “Microbial Stress Response,” held July 14-19th at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. This meeting brings together a demographically diverse group of 200 international scientists seeking to understand how microbes sense and respond to challenging and ever-changing environments. Understanding how microbes respond to stress has wide-reaching impacts on areas such as biotechnology, ecology, and environmental biology, as well as the symbiosis and pathogenesis relationships that microbes establish with the hosts they infect. In addition to formal talks presented by experienced researchers and trainees new to the field, engagement is facilitated by poster presentations to stimulate one-on-one interactions between researchers. NSF support defrays travel costs to allow attendance of diverse participants from early stages of their careers. This meeting therefore provides critical training opportunities for the next generation of scientists.Bacteria and Archaea face a nearly constant onslaught of diverse stressors, including nutrient limitations, temperature changes, antibiotics, phage, host immune systems, and more. Whether they can properly detect and respond to such stressors largely determines their survival in a world of fierce competition. Microbes have evolved finely tuned and sophisticated regulatory mechanisms for responding to stress by controlling genome duplication and repair, gene expression, proteostasis, RNA processing, and both central and secondary metabolism. Collectively, these responses enable survival in a range of harsh conditions. Thus, delineating how microbes respond to stress will elucidate the fundamental principles governing key cellular processes that are conserved from bacteria to humans. The meeting brings together seasoned investigators with early-career scientists through both formal talks and discussion sessions to encourage informal sharing on areas such as new approaches to understanding interactions between microbes and the environment, particularly modern imaging, genetic, metagenomic, and computational strategies for the analysis of bacterial physiology and community structures under conditions of stress and competition.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.