Frontier Leaders: Microbes inside

Frontier Leaders Seminar

Title: Microbes inside

Speaker: Willem M. de Vos

Affiliation: Helsinki & Wageningen University, NL

Abstract:

Intestinal microbes dominate our body since birth and outnumber our own cells by one or more orders of magnitude. They constitute the largest microbial ecosystem that is closest to our heart: our microbes inside. The collective genome of these microbes, also know as the microbiome, contributes considerably to the coding capacity of our system. However, unlike our own genome, the microbiome is not, or not only, vertically inherited. Moreover, this personalized organ can be modified by diet, life style and antimicrobials. Hence, there is great interest in relating the intestinal microbiome to health and disease. This requires a quantitative description of the main microbial community members, their genomes and functions. Moreover, as the intestinal microbes have developed intimate relations with the host, their dynamics and interactions should be analyzed. This contribution aims to summarize the recent state of the art in this area with specific attention for describing the microbial diversity in time and space and studying the microbe by functional metagenomics, notably meta-transcriptomics and meta-proteomics. Moreover, the application of these and other functional studies will be illustrated with specific probiotic and other microbes that are expected to contribute to our intestinal health and in human intervention trials that aim to establishing cause-effect relationships.

Biography:

Willem M. de Vos (1954) studied Biochemistry (cum laude) and received a cum laude PhD degree at the University of Groningen that was partly done at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, stayed for a post-doc at the NIRD (now IFR) in the UK, and became in 1983 research leader at NIZO, the research institute of the Netherlands dairy industry. Here he established a research group on lactic acid bacteria and (at the age of 32) became first Professor of Bacterial Genetics and later Chair of Microbiology at Wageningen University, where he also served as Director of the Department of Biomolecular Sciences. While continuing to chair the Laboratory of Microbiology his joint NIZO appointment was terminated in 2000 to become Programme Director Microbial Functionality and Safety at the Wageningen Centre for Food Sciences, now known as the Top Institute Food and Nutrition, a public-private Centre of Excellence in the Netherlands. In 2007 he stepped down from that function as he was elected Finland Distinguished Professor. He now serves as Professor and Chair Microbiology at Wageningen University and Professor of Molecular Microbiology at Helsinki University, where he is also Associated Group Leader at the Finnish Institute for Molecular Medicine. In 2011 he was also appointed as Academy Professor by the Finnish Academy of Sciences and is associated with the Faculty of Medicine and Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of the University of Helsinki.

He has supervised more than 80 PhD students, published more than 500 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters, and has been involved in the filing of more than 25 patents or patent applications. He received several international awards, including FEBS, EMBO and CEC fellowships, the Rhone Poulenc Marschall International Dairy Science Award, and the  Spinoza Award from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). In 2009 he was elected as member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and Arts and in 2010 he received the Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). In 2010 he was also selected as the Netherlands Most Entrepreneurial Scientist 2010. He serves in various international scientific advisory boards in the area of genomics, biotechnology and food sciences, is co-chairing the Faculty of 1000 on Food and Industrial Biotechnology, and is among the ISI highly cited authors in Microbiology (h factor > 75).