Welcome to the microbial division of the Graduates in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
 
From Dr. Carl Woese's delineation of the three domains of life to the present day, researchers at Illinois have made revealing discoveries about how microbes function and evolve. With strengths in diverse areas like environmental science, ecology, microbiology, molecular evolution and animal health, our university is in a prime position to become a leader in the field of microbial ecology, an emerging discipline where studies of microbial interactions in both the field and the flask are just beginning to reveal how communities of organisms too small to see have a huge influence on life as we know it.
 
GEEBmicro aims to provide a forum for discussion, collaboration, and technical support for GEEB members with a special interest in the ecology and evolution of microbes. We also hope to introduce the new students and faculty who are unfamiliar with our group to all of GEEB's academic and social activities. GEEBmicro welcomes one and all to join with us as an intellectual community exploring big questions about small organisms.
  
 
Activities for Spring 2008:
 
Microbial Ecology and Evolution Reading Group
Meetings will be held weekly (Friday afternoons: 2:30-3:30) in the Espresso Royale on Goodwin Ave. Meetings will alternate between scanning through the table of contents and interesting abstracts from major microbiology journals and in depth discussions of one or two papers selected at the previous meeting. Focal journals include the ISME Journal, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, FEMS Microbiology Ecology, Microbial Ecology, Environmental Microbiology, Nature Reviews- Microbiology, Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease, Science and Nature.
 
Objectives of the MEE reading group are:
  • To be exposed to current literature in microbial ecology and evolution
  • To become "well-read" microbial ecologists and evolutionary biologists
Readings for this week: Scan new tables of contents to select papers
 
Previous readings:
Kurland CG et al. 2006 Genomics and the irreducible nature of eukaryotic cells. Science. 312: 1011.
Kurland CG et al. 2007. The origins of the modern proteomes. Biochimie. 89: 1454-1463.
Kurland CG et al. 2003. Horizontal gene transfer: A critical view. PNAS 100:17.
Kurland CG. 2005. What tangled web: barriers to rampant horizontal gene transfer. BioEssays 27.7: 741.
Ochman H and N A Moran. 2001. Genes lost and genes found: evolution of bacterial pathogenesis and symbiosis. Science 292: 1096-1098.
Justice et. al 2008. Morphological plasticity as a bacterial survival strategy. Nature reviews 6: 162-168.		  

   Created 01/28/08; Updated 01/31/08