The Summer School in Applied Molecular Microbiology 2018 will be held on 8 – 16 September 2018 at the Inter-University Centre (IUC) in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

The theme of this year’s summer school is “Microbial Specialised Metabolites: From Genome to Molecule”. The context of the summer schools is to recognise the recent development of interest in microbial metabolites that has resulted from the sequencing of small molecule-producing microorganisms, coupled with the explosive development of sequencing technology, bioinformatics and chemical analysis. Ecological developments highlighting the wide range of roles for small molecules in microbial communities are also very significant. An important aim is to bring together a cadre of young scientists from diverse backgrounds, including molecular microbiology, chemistry, microbial ecology and bioinformatics, to share information that can lead to inter-disciplinary approaches to understanding and exploiting metabolite production.

Course content

• Isolation and screening of metabolite-producing microorganisms;
• Diversity of specialised metabolite producers;
• Natural product biosynthesis;
• Natural products in microbial communities and cell-cell interactions;
• Natural products in symbioses with higher organisms;
• Regulation of natural product biosynthesis, including intra- and extracellular signalling;
• Metagenomics and heterologous pathway expression;
• Diverse microbiomes;
• Genomics mining for novel natural product discovery;
• Prediction and characterisation of biosynthetic pathways in silico and experimentally;
• Activation of transcriptional silent cryptic gene clusters
• Pathway engineering.

Important dates

Application deadline: 31st May 2018