Concluding remarks of the 4th World Congress on Targeting Microbiota

Dr Marcin Ufnal from the Medical University of Warsaw, Poland was awarded for his short oral presentation about "The effects of intracolonic indole and hydrogen  sulfide, gut-bacteria metabolites, on the circulatory system in rats".

According to Dr Ufnal: "It is a great honor for me to be awarded by the ISM. My study was about the increasing evidence which suggests that gut bacteria may be involved in the control of the circulatory system. For example, it has been found that hypertension is associated with gut microbiota dysbiosis; however, the mechanisms are not clear. In my paper, [...],  I presented data suggesting that gut bacteria-derived hydrogen sulfide and indole may contribute to the control of arterial blood pressure and etiology of hypertension. Participation in the meeting was a great opportunity to exchange ideas with the leading scientists in the field of interactions between the microbiota and human organism. A number of extremely interesting papers and perfect organization of Targeting Microbiota 2016, make me a definite participant in the next year meeting.

The scientitic committee of Targeting Microbiota 2016 awarded Mrs Petra Videnska from Masaryk University, Faculty of Science, Czech Republic, for her poster presentation related to the comparison of sampling kits and DNA isolation kits for the 16S rDNA sequencing analysis. 

According to Mrs Videnska "Microbiome is emerging as the next frontier in human personalized medicine and this is the justification for organization of the conferences as this one. Targeting Microbiota Congress is a unique opportunity for biomedical researchers (from physicians to biologists and bioinformaticians) to meet and share the latest developments in the field. Hence, it was a great pleasure and honor for me to attend this conference in Paris. I particularly appreciated the careful selection of the lectures to reflect the state-of-the-art in the field. The conference also provided much-needed opportunity for networking and intensive discussions and brainstorming during poster sessions. Of particular interest for my present research were the talks discussing the difficulties related to the missing standards for 16S rDNA library preparation and for bioinformatics data analysis, since they all lead to reproducibility issues."

The third award was discerned to Eiman Al Hinai from the University of Reading, United Kingdom for her poster presentation about the amino acid availability, the gut microbiome and colonic genotoxicity.

According to E. Al Hinai, "the utilisation of amino acids as a substrate enables shifts in the colonic flora and a transition to a more genotoxic environment. Further work is needed to understand the availability of dietary amino acids in the colon following consumption of specific foods."