BISMiS Live is our monthly seminar series, held online and scheduled for the third Saturday of each month, starting March 2021. The aim of the series is to reach out to microbiology students and early career scientists with an interest in microbial ecology and systematics. These interactive sessions with expert scientists from across the globe will foster interest in microbial systematics and the diversity and ecology of microbes in our world.

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2021 2022 2023 2024

Speaker: Prof. J Peter W Young, University of York, UK

Title of the Talk: How an ICSP taxonomic subcommittee helps microbiologists

Biosketch: Peter Young gained his PhD in animal population genetics from the University of Cambridge in 1975, and moved first to Stony Brook, New York, and then the University of Sussex in the UK for postdocs, before gaining a permanent post at the John Innes Institute in Norwich, UK. Here, he switched from animals to plants and studied the genetics of peas for several years before becoming interested in the nodule bacteria in the pea roots. Realising that there was a world-leading rhizobium genetics lab downstairs, and that there were barely any studies on the population genetics of bacteria, he switched his focus to bacterial diversity. After he moved to the University of York to become Professor of Molecular Ecology, he added arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi to his list of study organisms, but he has never forsaken rhizobia. He retired and became an emeritus professor in 2016.
A molecular ecologist’s job is to take the latest methods that have been developed for studying genetically uniform model organisms in the sterile laboratory, and adapt them to work on diverse and dirty organisms dragged in from the field. Over the course of his fifty-year research career, Peter has moved from enzyme electrophoresis to restriction digestion and Southern blotting and then to a host of methods based on PCR, before arriving at genome sequencing and finally the comparative analysis of thousands of bacterial genomes.
He has published over 250 papers. He published the first studies of genetic diversity in rhizobia, the first 16S phylogeny of the Alphaproteobacteria, the first complete genome of Rhizobium leguminosarum, and the first substantial studies of molecular diversity in arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. He has participated in the description of a number of bacterial species and genera, and has had two bacterial taxa named after him by others: the species Paraburkholderia youngii and the genus Peteryoungia. Since retiring, he no longer has his own lab but continues to publish in collaboration with colleagues around the world.
He has been on the editorial board of various journals and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Genes. Most importantly for today’s talk, he has been a member of the ICSP Subcommittee for rhizobia and agrobacteria for thirty years and its chair for the past ten. He has also recently become a member of the Judicial Commission of the ICSP.

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