Human Microbiome: Diversity, Selection and Adaptation (Q7)
February 18-21, 2025  | Fairmont Banff Springs, Banff, AB, Canada
Suzanne Devkota, Jeff F Miller and Roberto G. Kolter
Scholarship Deadline: Dec. 6, 2024 | Abstract Deadline: Jan. 29, 2025 | Early Registration Deadline: Jan. 4, 2025
* Session Chair † Invited but not yet accepted | Program current as of August 23, 2025 4 AM | For the most up-to-date details, visit https://www.keystonesymposia.org
Tuesday, February 18, 2025
4:00–8:00 PM Registration Van Horne Foyer
6:00–8:00 PM Welcome Mixer Van Horne Foyer
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
7:00–8:00 AM Breakfast President's Hall
8:00–9:00 AM Welcome and Keynote Address (Joint) Van Horne A
  * Suzanne Devkota, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
Session Chair		  
  * Bana Jabri, University of Chicago
Session Chair		  
  Dan R. Littman, HHMI/New York University School of Medicine
Commensals and Pathobionts in the Gut		  
9:00–9:30 AM Coffee Break Van Horne Foyer
9:30–11:30 AM Microbes Across Space, Time, and Populations Van Horne A
  * Jeff F Miller, University of California, Los Angeles
Session Chair		  
  Roberto G. Kolter, Harvard Medical School
The History of Microbiology and Modern-Day Approaches		  
  Mohamed S. Abou Donia, Princeton University
Microbiome-Derived Small Molecules in Health and Disease		  
  Ashlee M Earl, Broad Institute
Genomic Insights into the Global Spread of Antibiotic Resistance		  
  Moran Yassour, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Short Talk: Revealing Hidden Diversity in Bifidobacterium Longum: Insights from Early Life Cohorts		  
  Orlando DeLeon, University of Chicago
Short Talk: Small and Large Bowel Microbiota Mismatches Following Fecal Microbiota Transplantation Lead to Long-Term, Unintended Effects On The Host		  
11:30–1:00 PM Poster Setup Van Horne C
11:30–2:30 PM On Own for Lunch
1:00–10:00 PM Poster Viewing Van Horne C
2:30–4:30 PM Symposia Spotlight: Late-breaking research presentations selected from abstract submissions Van Horne A
  * Ben E Rubin, UC Berkeley
Session Chair		  
  Julian Garneau, University of Lausanne
Phage-Derived Lysins for Precision Engineering of the Small Intestinal Microbiota		  
  Simon Gray, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Human Microbiota-Associated Mice: Mouse-Adapted Human IBD Microbiota Transplant to Colitis-Susceptible Germ-Free Mice Induces More Consistent, Reproducible Colitis with High Microbial Transfer Efficiency Relative to Human Fecal Transplant		  
  Jigyasa Arora, University of California, Berkeley
Phage-Derived Protein Delivery: A Tool for Microbiome Interactions		  
  Dinh Quan Nhan, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
Identification of a Type VII Toxin Secretion System in Crohn’s Disease patient-derived Clostridium innocuum		  
  Jee-Yon Lee, University of California at Davis
Host-Derived Electron Acceptors Facilitate Uremic Toxin Production by E. coli, Exacerbating Chronic Kidney Disease		  
  Alex Rodriguez-Palacios, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine
Genetically Uniform Parabacteroides from Fistulous Microlesions Highlights Lineage Adaptation in a Transmissible Bacterial-Succinate Cytotoxic Model of Crohn’s Disease Complications		  
  Nora Pyenson, NYU
Diverse Phage Communities are Maintained Stably on A Clonal Bacterial Host		  
  Maximilian Baumgartner, CeMM GmbH
Epimerization of Host-Derived Bile Acids By Ruminococcus Gnavus as Hallmark of Microbiota Dysbiosis		  
4:30–5:00 PM Coffee Available Van Horne Foyer
5:00–7:00 PM Microbial Diversity and Fitness Van Horne A
  * Roberto G. Kolter, Harvard Medical School
Session Chair		  
  Jeff F Miller, University of California, Los Angeles
Diversity Generating Retroelements in the Gut Microbiome		  
  Maria Mercedes Zambrano, Corporación CorpoGen
Community Adaptations Across Environments		  
  Suzanne Devkota, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
Host-Microbe Dynamics in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases		  
  Christopher Mancuso, MIT
Short Talk: Intraspecies Warfare Restricts Strain Coexistence In Human Skin Microbiomes		  
  Ming Liu, University of Oxford
Short Talk: How Does Diversity Affect Ecological Stability?		  
7:00–8:00 PM Social Hour with Lite Bites President's Hall
7:30–10:00 PM Poster Session 1 Van Horne C
Thursday, February 20, 2025
7:00–8:00 AM Breakfast President's Hall
8:00–11:00 AM What is a Pathobiont? Microbial Adaptations and Host Damage (Joint) Van Horne A
  Peter J Turnbaugh, University of California, San Francisco
Harnessing the Gut Microbiome to Counteract and Predict Cancer Chemotherapy Toxicity		  
  Purna C Kashyap, Mayo Clinic
Time to Turn the Spotlight on the Small Intestinal Microbiome		  
  * Russell E Vance, University of California, Berkeley
At First Sight: How Hosts and Microbes Sense Each Other		  
  Iliyan D Iliev, Weill-Cornell Medical College
Fungal Commensalism and the Co-evolution of Type 2 Immunity		  
  Darryl A Abbott, University of Pittsburgh
Short Talk: Maternal Immunoglobulin a Regulates the Development of the Neonatal Microbiota and Intestinal Microbiota-Specific CD4+ T Cell Responses		  
  Darian T Carroll, Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Short Talk: Regulation of Enterocyte Lipid Metabolism by the Microbiota-derived Metabolite, Phenyllactic Acid		  
9:00–9:20 AM Coffee Break Van Horne Foyer
9:20–9:25 AM Award Recipient Acknowledgement Van Horne A
11:00–1:00 PM Poster Setup Van Horne C
11:00–2:45 PM On Own for Lunch
1:00–2:30 PM Career Roundtable (Joint) Van Horne B
  Ashlee M Earl, Broad Institute
Director, Bacterial Genomics		  
  Trevor Lawley, Microbiotica/Wellcome Sanger Institute
Founder & CSO/Group Leader		  
  Marin Vulic, Seres Therapeutics
Senior Principal Scientist		  
  Alex Rodriguez-Palacios, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine
Assistant Professor		  
  Jessica Langer, Helmsley Charitable Trust
Program Officer		  
1:00–10:00 PM Poster Viewing Van Horne C
2:45–4:30 PM Panel Discussion 1: Toward Molecular Mechanisms in Microbiome Research: Insights from Genetic Systems and Co-Evolved Pathways (Joint) Van Horne A
  Ramnik Xavier, Massachusetts General Hospital
Panel Co-Leader		  
  Ami S. Bhatt, Stanford University
Panel Co-Leader		  
  Suzanne Devkota, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
  
  Andrew L Goodman, Yale School of Medicine
  
  Michael A. Fischbach, Stanford University
  
  George Kassiotis, The Francis Crick Institute
  
4:30–5:00 PM Coffee Available Van Horne Foyer
5:00–5:05 PM Jessica Langer, Helmsley Trust Introduction Van Horne A
5:05–7:00 PM Host Colonization and Co-Evolution of Host-Microbial Interactions (Joint) Van Horne A
  Maria Manuel Dias da Mota, GIMM- Gulbenkian Institute For Molecular Medicine
Inter-Kingdom Interactions Shaping Malaria Infections		  
  Andrew L Goodman, Yale School of Medicine
Bacterial Diversity and Host Response to Medications		  
  * Melanie Blokesch, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Environmental Lifestyle and Evolvability of Vibrio Cholerae		  
  Clarissa Campbell, The Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (CeMM)
Short Talk: Bacterial Quorum Sensing Molecules Produced Via HdtS Homologs Affect Host T Cell Immunity In The Mammalian Gut		  
  Gregory P Donaldson, UCLA
Short Talk: Gut Microbiota Induce an Immunoglobulin A-DMBT1 Feedback Loop to Tune Epithelial Cycling and Tumor Risk		  
7:00–8:00 PM Social Hour with Lite Bites President's Hall
7:30–10:00 PM Poster Session 2 Van Horne C
Friday, February 21, 2025
7:00–8:00 AM Breakfast President's Hall
8:00–11:00 AM Genomic Insights from Big Data and Sequencing Van Horne A
  Trevor Lawley, Microbiotica/Wellcome Sanger Institute
Integrating Mass Culturing and Metagenomic Analysis for Human Microbiome Translational Science		  
  Ami S. Bhatt, Stanford University
Dissecting Microbe: Microbe and Microbe: Host Interactions using Genomics		  
  * Katherine S. Pollard, University of California, San Francisco
Strain-Resolved Metagenome-Wide Association Studies		  
  Jordan Jensen, Harvard University
Short Talk: Dramatically Improved Viral Profiling From Metagenomes And Metatranscriptomes Using Marker Sequence Identification		  
  Menghan Liu, Columbia University
Short Talk: Tree-Of-Life Scale Genotype-Phenotype Association Reveals Conserved Gene Modules that Govern Microbial Colonization of the Mammalian Gut		  
  William Jogia, NYU Grossman School of Medicine
Short Talk: How to Quantify Microbiome Effects for Hundreds of Food Items: A Bayesian Model for High-Dimensional, Hierarchically Related Predictors		  
  Melanie Schirmer, Technical University of Munich
Short Talk: Gene-Centric Metagenomic Analysis Reveals Microbiome Functional Insights into Diseases		  
9:00–9:20 AM Coffee Break Van Horne Foyer
11:00–2:30 PM On Own for Lunch
4:30–5:00 PM Coffee Available Van Horne Foyer
5:00–7:00 PM Novel Approaches and Applications Van Horne A
  Katherine Duncan, University of Newcastle
Abyssal Antibiotics – Marine Biodiscovery from the Deep Ocean		  
  Hannah Wastyk, Interface Biosciences
Bacterial Metabolites as Drugs		  
  Cammie Lesser, Massachusetts General Hospital
Bacterial Delivery Systems from Agents of Pathogenesis to Vectors for Novel Therapeutics		  
  * David Bikard, Pasteur Institute and Eligo Bioscience
Genetic Perturbation of Gut Bacteria With Engineered Phage Vectors and CRISPR		  
7:00–7:15 PM Meeting Wrap-Up: Outcomes and Future Directions (Organizers) Van Horne A
7:15–8:15 PM Social Hour with Lite Bites President's Hall
8:15–9:15 PM Entertainment Van Horne A
Saturday, February 22, 2025
12:00–11:59 PM Departure