Workshop

Balancing public health surveillance with sewer services: Managing microbes as contaminants, catalysts, and data

Co-organizers: Fangqiong Ling and Cresten Mansfeldt

Sunday 10 September 2023, 13:00-17:00

Cost: AU$100

Wastewater-based public health monitoring has attracted immense attention and investment from academics and industry over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. The microbes and their genomes in wastewater are at the heart of this application, linking this emerging field of research to other applications of wastewater microbes, e.g., water treatment, biosensing, and fecal source tracking. This workshop aims to facilitate the exchange of knowledge among researchers exploring the various applications of the ecology of microbes interacting with wastewater infrastructure. The workshop will be organized in presentations and discussions. The presentation session will involve specific scenarios that deploy new and established methods to derive insights from wastewater. Discussions will be organized by topics such as applications of new and validated technologies, and engagement with stakeholders. Panelists/speakers will be invited from multiple countries to facilitate discussion about globally-emerging and regionally-specific considerations with an expected audience composed of engineers, public health officials, and academics.

Workshop Panel:

Dr. Amy Pruden
W. Thomas Rice Professor and University Distinguished Professor
The Charles E. Via Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech)

Dr. Daniel Deere
Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Consultant
Water Futures Pty Ltd

Dr. Gaofeng Ni
Postdoctoral Fellow, Team Leader Industrial Microbiology, Greening Lab
Department of Microbiology, Biomedicine Discovery Institute
Monash University

Dr. Krista Rule Wigginton
Associate Professor
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
University of Michigan

Dr. Phil Choi
Senior Environmental Health Scientist
Water Unit, Health Protection Branch,
Queensland Public Health and Scientific Services, Queensland Health

Ir. Dr. Tong Zhang
Chair Professor
Department of Civil Engineering
The University of Hong Kong

Ms. Yu Wang
Research scholar
Centre for Water and Environmental Biotechnology
The University of Queensland

Application of the MiDAS database for microbial community analyses

Facilitated by Per Nielsen

Sunday 10 September 2023, 13:00-17:00

Cost: AU$100

Microbial communities are essential for key processes in wastewater treatment, nutrient recovery and bioenergy production. Good methods to study their diversity and dynamics are important for research purposes and for informed management of the systems. A reliable, fast and easy method is 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing when high quality reference databases are applied, such as the MiDAS reference databases.

The workshop provides detailed information about the application of the MiDAS reference database for microbial community analyses and includes short lectures, Q/A and hands-on training. It covers advantages in using ecosystems-specific reference databases, presents the MiDAS Fieldguide and examples of use. We dive more into the new MiDAS reference databases for wastewater treatment plants and anaerobic digesters (MiDAS 4 and 5) and show how to process raw amplicon data and assign MiDAS taxonomy. We will also discuss how to use metagenomics for species analysis and discuss pro et cons. The Hand-on part will include basic analysis of microbial communities using the ampvis2 R package. It is an advantage to bring computer with installed RStudio.

Workshop Panel:
Prof. Per Halkjær Nielsen

Assoc. Prof. Morten Dueholm

Postdoc Yu Yang

PhD students Marie Riisgaard-Jensen and Sofie Zacho Vestergaard

all Aalborg University.

Conference Secretariat Sharon James
contact@mewe23.com @mewe2023