What's new in the field of lactic acid bacteria? The 9th International Symposium on Lactic Acid Bacteria (LAB9) will take place 31 August to 4 September 2008 in Egmond aan Zee, The Netherlands. Traditionally, the triannual LAB symposium focuses on the themes of genetics, physiology, and applications of lactic acid bacteria (LAB). These microorganisms are widely used in the food industry but are also increasingly applied as probiotics, enzyme and metabolite factories, and vaccine delivery vehicles. In the last decade, we have seen the rapid development of a wide array of “-omic” technologies that have greatly influenced and changed the field. The classical applications—the optimal use of LAB for food preservation through strain selection and optimization of fermentation technologies—are still very important, not in the least because of the still-persisting problems of low consumer acceptance of genetically modified microorganisms in foods. However, the new technologies have provided novel opportunities both for pathway and network engineering for flavor, texture, and preservation and for developing effective and fast analytical tools for strain selection, adaptation, and evolution studies. Moreover, human health has become a major theme in applications of LAB ranging from probiotic-research-related gut ecological studies to immunological studies for the application of mucosal vaccination to the production of nutraceuticals. Also, bacteria that are not classical LAB but are yet important, such as bifidobacteria, are now increasingly the subject of study, and the interaction of LAB with the human body is recognized as an extremely important area. For these reasons, we have decided to adjust the scope of LAB9 to highlight these novel developments and research areas. Three major themes have been selected for the LAB9 symposium, i.e., systems biology, health, and evolution, and these themes have been further divided into topics such as (functional) genomics, metabolic modeling, metabolic engineering, mixed-culture behavior, probiotics, host-microbe interactions, and different food-related areas, including food safety and flavor generation. In this way, we expect to be able to better address these increasingly important fields while maintaining the old philosophies of the LAB conference. Various speakers outside the field of LAB have been invited to give expert talks about these important areas, especially when advances within non-LAB microbiology fields provide foresight into future LAB target areas. Many conference attendees working in both industry and academia increasingly apply the novel tools and genome information that have become available. We are now in the era of postgenomic research, and great challenges that were previously believed to be impossible to meet are now within reach. Sequencing of genomes has become fast, standard, and inexpensive (talk of a future $1,000 human genome automatically implies a less-than-$10 bacterial genome). This calls for increased power in bioinformatics to enable rapid mining and evolutionary studies, e.g., by following the evolution of strains at the sequence level on a daily or weekly basis. For the first time in the history of LAB symposia, we issued an open call to LAB researchers to submit their best work to be considered for publication in Applied and Environmental Microbiology (AEM), the journal that is in our opinion best suited for this purpose. We hereby express our great appreciation for the invaluable efforts that have gone into attaining this goal. In our view, the current issue of AEM gives a superb overview of more than 20 front-running publications on the major themes and topics mentioned above. We hope that the success of this issue will encourage future LAB meeting organizers to continue this initiative and dedicate a special AEM issue in 2011 to the ever-growing field of LAB research.
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Mar 28, 2024
Iva Čanak + 4
Open Access
