“Microbes in the City” meeting looks awesome

Just got wind of this upcoming meeting, “Microbes in the City: Mapping the Urban Genome” that looks like it has a fantastic series of talks lined up.   The meeting is a single day, June 19th, and is hosted by The New York Academy of Sciences and New York University.  From the conference website, here’s the description of the meeting:

Microbes run the world. The human body and our environment are inhabited by trillions of bacteria and other microbes that carry out the majority of the biochemical activity on the planet. From birth, all of our interactions with the world expose us to different sources of microbes, and, conversely, expose microbes to us. As humans settle into built environments within urban settings, microorganisms both within and around us are changing accordingly. Yet we still understand very little about the complex, interdependent microbial ecosystems found in the built environment. By virtue of recent technological breakthroughs in sensing, sampling, and genetic sequencing of the microbes in our midst, we can quantify and map microbial transmission between humans, urban pests such as cockroaches and pigeons, and the air and surfaces of urban habitats – from kiosks and subways, to soil and sewage.

This conference will bring together scientists, engineers, architects, public health workers, ethicists, and policy makers at the forefront of efforts to map all of the genetic information that makes up the urban genome. This information–a living microbial fingerprint known as a metagenome–is intended to be used to create built environments that consider microbial ecology. The goal is to improve the health and productivity of these environments such that we may be able to design healthier homes and workplaces, identify potential health threats, track and fight disease epidemics, and even chart the environmental impact of major storms.

And here’s the meeting agenda: