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Plenary Panel

Zoom and Discord links will be in your registration email.

Session times

  • Day 3 Friday 10th September 2021. 16:00-17:30 (BST/UTC+1)

VIDEO

https://youtu.be/z794O5tqimk

About this session

This year’s plenary session will be a discussion panel from four eminent experts in the field of Campylobacter. Expect a lively discussion on the broader trends - past, present and future - in Campylobacter research.

Panel members include:

Professor Christine Szymanski

Dr. Szymanski has been exploring bacterial glycomics for more than two decades, working on food pathogens since the early 1990s, with a particular emphasis on Campylobacter jejuni. She combines her expertise in food safety and animal health with novel therapeutic diagnostic platforms developed during her postdoctoral fellowship at the Naval Medical Research Center vaccine program (1996-2000), the key findings while employed at the National Research Council of Canada (2000-2008), and the translational advances during her tenure as an Alberta Innovates Technology Futures Scholar at the University of Alberta (2008-2016). She was the first to demonstrate that bacteria are capable of N-glycosylating proteins and is now exploiting these systems to create glycoconjugate vaccines and oral therapeutics through recombinant expression in Escherichia coli. Dr. Szymanski was also the first to demonstrate that viruses specific for bacteria express proteins that can be used as novel therapeutics in addition to their recognized diagnostic value. These viruses (bacteriophages) are the most abundant biological entity on earth (1031) and are therefore a limitless resource for exploitation, especially in the area of glycomics.

The Szymanski laboratory uses multidisciplinary approaches to 1) characterize pathways responsible for generating bacterial glycoconjugates and 2) exploit viral recognition proteins that bind to these structures to develop novel platforms for agricultural and food safety applications. Our studies are now expanding to the analyses of carbohydrate metabolism and bacteriophage influence on the gut microbiome, and development of glycoconjugate vaccines against other pathogens.

Professor Sam Sheppard

Professor and director of Bioinformatics (Milner Centre for Evolution) at the University of Bath and Co-PI of MRC CLIMB (Cloud Infrastructure for Microbial Bioinformatics)–the UKs largest cloud-based system for the analysis of microbial genomes.

Research in my group centres on the use of genetics/genomics and phenotypic studies to address complex questions in the ecology, epidemiology and evolution of microbes. Our most recent interests focus upon comparative genome analyses to describe the core and flexible genome of pathogenic bacteria (Campylobacter, Staphylococcus, Helicobacter and Escherichia coli) and how this is related to population genetic structuring, the maintenance of species, and the evolution of host/niche adaptation and virulence.

Professor Brendan Wren

​​Brendan Wren’s research interests predominantly involve determining the genetic basis by which bacterial pathogens cause disease. His research group exploits a range of post genome research strategies to gain a comprehensive understanding of how these pathogens function, how they evolve and how they interact with their respective hosts. A core interest includes studying glycosylation and glycostructures and how this relates to the survival and virulence of bacterial pathogens. An application of this basic research is the development of Protein Glycan Coupling Technology and other glycobiotechnological innovations for the production of recombinant glycoproteins. This has been applied for the development of inexpensive glycoconjugate vaccines for human and veterinary use.

Dr Arnoud van Vliet

Arnoud graduated in 1991 from Utrecht University, The Netherlands, studying Medical Biology. He obtained his PhD in 1995 from the Veterinary Microbiology department of the Utrecht University, working on molecular characterisation and detection of the tick-borne ruminant pathogen Cowdria (Ehrlichia) ruminantium. For his postdoc, he moved to the Department of Genetics of the University of Leicester, UK, working on gene regulation and virulence of the zoonotic foodborne pathogen Campylobacter jejuni. He then obtained a personal fellowship in 1999 from the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) to work on metal metabolism, gene regulation in the human gastric pathogen Helicobacter pylori, first at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and subsequently as lecturer at the Erasmus MC-University Medical Center in Rotterdam. In 2007, he took up a position as Research Leader at the Institute of Food Research, Norwich, UK, where he has led a research group focusing on the foodborne pathogens Campylobacter and Listeria, combining microbiology, molecular biology, genomics and other ‘omics with bioinformatic technologies, to understand the processes allowing these bacteria to survive in the food chain and cause illness.

Arnoud had joined the Surrey Vet School as Senior Lecturer in Veterinary microbiology in October 2016.