Tuesday, 30 November 2021
16:00 - 17:30 (EET/UTC +2)
This month we will have the fourth and final webinar in Resistomap’s Autumn 2021 series on the science and application of antibiotic resistance monitoring. We have addressed some very important questions in our webinar series so far, raised by both our guest speakers and the audience. In this webinar, we will explore two of the reoccurring questions in past webinars, namely the threshold, or monitoring baseline, for the presence of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) and the topic of hospital environments and their significance in the spread of antibiotic resistance in the environment.
Our first guest speaker is Johan Bengtsson-Palme, who is the coordinator of the EMBARK project. EMBARK is a project working on establishing a baseline for antimicrobial resistance in key environments. Having a baseline for measuring ARG is a huge step in the fight to protect our healthcare. It could provide the context needed to enable policymakers to take proactive measures to discover potential outbreaks before it is too late.
Following this, our second speaker Jesse Majlander will present Resistomap’s project on monitoring hospital wastewater. In this project we used ResistApp -- our very own digital monitoring tool that combines high-throughput quantitative PCR (HT-qPCR) with automated data analysis – to study the dynamics of ARG profiles in wastewater from two hospitals in Helsinki, Finland.
Similar to our previous webinars, the presentations will be followed by a roundtable discussion with questions from the audience.
University of Tokyo, Japan
National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology (NIHE), Vietnam
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Johan Bengtsson-Palme is an Assistant Professor at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He does research in the fields of microbiology and microbial ecology, specifically targeting antibiotic resistance, pathogenesis, and interactions in bacterial communities through large-scale experimental work, metagenomics, and bioinformatics. He is the coordinator of the EMBARK Project, which works towards establishing a monitoring baseline for antimicrobial resistance in key environments.
James M. Tiedje is University Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, and of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences, and is Director of the Center for Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University. He received his B.S. degree from Iowa State University and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University. His research focuses on microbial ecology, physiology and diversity, especially regarding the nitrogen cycle, biodegradation of environmental pollutants and use of molecular methods to understand microbial community structure and function. His group has discovered several microbes that biodegrade chlorinated pollutants and is using genomics to better understand microbial functions in their environment. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of Applied and Environmental Microbiology and Editor of Microbial and Molecular Biology Reviews. He has over 500 refereed publications including seven in Science and Nature. He shared the 1992 Finley Prize from UNESCO for research contributions in microbiology of international significance, is Fellow of the AAAS (The American Association for the Advancement of Science), the American Academy of Microbiology, and the Soil Science Society of America, and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He was President of the American Society for Microbiology and the International Society for Microbial Ecology.
Dr. Windi Muziasari has gained years of experience and the know-how to monitor antibiotic resistance from environmental samples such as wastewater, rivers, lakes, soils and manure using a high-throughput gene profiling during her PhD and PostDoc at the University of Helsinki. She wanted other researchers at universities, research institutions and hospitals to gain easy access to this technology and that was why she moved from academia to entrepreneurship by founding Resistomap in 2018. Resistomap is the first company in the world to commercialize antibiotic resistance monitoring service in the environment. Headquartered in Helsinki, Resistomap's mission is to mitigate the spread of antibiotic resistance by providing robust tools for monitoring. Resistomap combines the molecular genetics method and data science to provide a service for antibiotic resistance monitoring comprehensively and fast. Currently Resistomap has served over 90 projects from 24 countries.
Resistomap, Finland
Jesse Majlander has a master's degree in microbiology and microbial biotechnology from the University of Helsinki. He has worked with environmental antimicrobial resistance for over 5 years and before that organised free-for-all events to generate awareness on all aspects of AMR. Jesse is the chairperson of the NGO One Health Finland and has been working with Resistomap for almost two years, first as an R&D Scientist and for the past year as an Operations Manager.
James M. Tiedje is University Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, and of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences, and is Director of the Center for Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University. He received his B.S. degree from Iowa State University and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University. His research focuses on microbial ecology, physiology and diversity, especially regarding the nitrogen cycle, biodegradation of environmental pollutants and use of molecular methods to understand microbial community structure and function. His group has discovered several microbes that biodegrade chlorinated pollutants and is using genomics to better understand microbial functions in their environment. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of Applied and Environmental Microbiology and Editor of Microbial and Molecular Biology Reviews. He has over 500 refereed publications including seven in Science and Nature. He shared the 1992 Finley Prize from UNESCO for research contributions in microbiology of international significance, is Fellow of the AAAS (The American Association for the Advancement of Science), the American Academy of Microbiology, and the Soil Science Society of America, and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He was President of the American Society for Microbiology and the International Society for Microbial Ecology.