RSSA April meeting - Elizabeth Dinsdale

The Royal Society of South Australia are a membership-based learned society interested in science, with beginnings thatcan be traced back to 1834.The major aim of the Society is the promotion and diffusion of scientific knowledge, particularly in relation to Natural Sciences. The Society promotes science through publications, seminars and grants. For more information please conslut our website:http://www.rssa.org.au/

Royal Society of South Australia

RSSA April meeting - Prof. Elizabeth Dinsdale

We welcome our speaker for the April meeting, Prof. Elizabeth Dinsdale (Matthew Flinders Fellow of Marine Biology, Flinders University) with &quot;Microbiomes of Chondrichthyes: Using basal vertebrates to investigate phylosymbiosis&quot;.
We will hold this as an &quot;in-person&quot; event in our Society rooms, but due to COVID-19 distancing requirements, attendance will be limited. Members will receive priority access, but we will simultaneously live-stream the meeting via Zoom for those not in attendance or for interested non-members. To attend, you MUST register via Eventbrite.
ABSTRACT: Microbiomes are at the nexus of healthy hosts and environments, but the fundamental laws that govern host-associated microbiome assembly remain unresolved. Chondrichthyan fish (sharks, rays and chimaeras) are ancient extant vertebrates providing a pivotal point in host-associated microbiome evolution, displaying a broad geographic distribution, and diverse biophysical and physiological traits. We will capitalize on these unique features, to decouple the contributions to microbiome assembly from the environment vs the host. To date we have collected microbiomes from the epidermis of 12 Chondrichthyan fish, including whale sharks to round rays, at multiple locations around the world. The microbiome are species specific and the similarity of the microbiomes mirrors the phylogeny of the hosts, which is consistent with the phylosymbiosis theory. However, this theory is does not identify the mechanism behind the host-microbe associations, and whether the relationship occurs because of selection from the environment or evolutionary processes. We are linking the microbiome with measures of the physiology of the elasmobranchs to understand drivers of microbiome association and possible co-evolution.
BIO: Elizabeth Dinsdale received her Ph.D. from James Cook University in 2005 and became a Faculty at San Diego State University in 2009. She moved to South Australia in 2020 to take up a Professorship at Flinders University. Her research is at the forefront of analysing functional metagenomes which was describe in a Nature paper in 2008 and was part of a team that identified a highly abundant novel phage that infects half of the world’s population described in Nature Communication in 2014. She uses genomics to investigate the biodiversity and ecology of microbes and viruses on coral reefs, kelp forest and shark skin, with the goal of understanding how microbial and viral communities responds to environmental pressures and affects the health of the host and ecosystem. Her lab has developed novel tools, undergraduate education programs, and international workshops to analyse metagenomics data and understand the structure of host microbiomes. With undergraduate students, she has sequenced and annotated the Californian Sea lion genome. She is expanding the description of elasmobranch genomes, including the silky shark and 7 elasmobranch mitochondrial genomes and is using proteomics and metabolomics to link the microbiome with the physiology and distribution of the host.

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RSSA April meeting - Elizabeth Dinsdale

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RSSA April meeting - Elizabeth Dinsdale

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