International conferences

Stefan Lips for his presentation on “How to anchor metabolic responses of microbial communities to community functioning?”

• Status: PhD student (>3 Year)
• Lab: Department Bioanalytische Ökotoxikologie, Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany

• About me and my research: During my bachelor I realised that every product finally ends up in the water, but there was nobody who knew for certain whether this has an effect on the ecosystem. This realization paved my way to the field of ecotoxicology. Nowadays I am working on the effects of chemicals on microorganism communities and their function in the ecosystem

Laurianne Paris for her presentation on “Metabolic response of Microbacterium sp. C448 exposed to environmental and medicinal concentrations of sulfamethazine antibiotic”

• Status: post doc
• Labs: Laboratoire Microorganismes : Génome et Environnement- UMR 6023, Clermont-Ferrand, France ; Insitut de Chimie de Clermont-Ferrand – UMR 6296, Clermont-Ferrand, France
  • About me and my research: The aim of our study was to elucidate the metabolic processes involved in sulfonamide biodegradation by using the sulfonamide-mineralizing bacterium Microbacterium C448, present in the environment, and the sulfamethazine (SMZ) antibiotic as models. Our starting hypothesis is the following one: at low SMZ concentrations, C448 could mineralize it without activating its resistance pathway, while the bacterium would need to resist to be able to degrade it at high concentrations. Our first results of the proteom analysis confirmed the use of the SMZ degradation pathway in vivo conditions, and a dependance of the proteins involved in degradation to the SMZ concentration. However, while the resistance pathway was used at a low SMZ concentration, Microbacterium sp. C448 did not use this pathway at high SMZ concentration, suggesting that another restistance pathway was involved or that SMZ was toxic only at a low concentration.

Ana Miguel Rios for her presentation on “Organic micropollutant degradation in a membrane bioreactor inoculated with activated

• Status : 3^rd year PhD student
• Lab: Department of Microbiology, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

• About me and my research: I am a motivated PhD student interested in microbial metabolism. My current research focuses on improving biodegradation of pharmaceuticals in wastewater treatment plants. More specifically, I am trying to decipher the metabolic mechanisms underlying their removal in order to correctly predict it and enhance it

sludge”

Loren Billet for her presentation on “Antibiotics favor the establishment of antibiotrophic bacteria in agricultural soil microbial communities, but are not always sufficient to enhance antibiotic-degradation: manure spreading can help.”

  Status: 3^rd year PhD student

• Labs:INRAE, UMR Agroecology, Dijon, FRANCE ; INRAE, UR Riverly, Villeurbanne, FRANCE
• About me and my research: After a microbiology master degree focusing on ecotoxicological issues and internships on pesticide-degrading bacteria, I became interested in antibiotics as emerging pollutants and the associated bacterial functions. My work aims at better understanding the antibiotrophic function (use of antibiotics as substrates), and in particular its impact on the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in agro-ecological systems.