This biennial conference draws scientists from diverse fields and promotes interactions that are highly interdisciplinary. The ensuing intellectual cross-fertilization has had and continues to have a major impact on the fields of evolution and ecology. The Microbial Population Biology GRC is a major forum for the introduction and discussion of major concepts in pathogen evolution, drug resistance, microbial communities, and Darwinian Medicine.

One major emphasis of the 2011 meeting is the evolution and dynamics of infectious disease. Recent years have seen the emergence of HIV, SARS, West Nile (in the U.S.), MRSA, and a new H1N1 pandemic a year ago. While the treatment and mechanistic study of diseases typically falls within the domains of clinicians and microbiologists, the emergence of new infectious diseases is primarily a problem in evolution and ecology. Molecular biology might tell us which mutations adapt a bird flu virus to human-human transmission, but it is evolutionary biology that asks about the fate of those mutations once arisen, and epidemiology tells us if a virus is dynamically able to spread. Evolutionary and population biology are equally critical in understanding how to control diseases once they have ‘emerged.’

A second focus is our microbiome, the collective multitude of microbes living on us. Deceptively, this new topic may seem disconnected from infectious disease, but it may prove to be relevant to infectious disease and much more. Although basic work is now being done to identify what constitutes our microbiome, how it differs among us, and how it changes, population biology (including ecology) will provide the foundation for understanding the processes governing microbiome composition and how it might be manipulated to our benefit, such as the effects various probiotic and prebiotic species have on our health and our susceptibility to infectious agents.

A third focus this year will be the ecology of algae used for biofuels. To date, the promises of algae for fuel have come from engineers working in the lab, but scaling up production to millions of acre-feet of water outdoors will require that we understand how to control and manipulate community dynamics.

The 2011 meeting has a strong emphasis on practical applications and relevant organisms. The list includes talks on probiotics from researchers in the dairy industry, talks from the algal industry, phage therapy, polio eradication, fitness landscapes of HIV drug resistance, and a novel attempt (in progress) to eradicate dengue with the bacterium Wolbacchia.