The 15th International Symposium on Microbial Ecology (ISME15) was held from Aug. 24 to 29 at Coex Convention Center in Seoul, South Korea. Dr. Yan Qingyun, from the Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IHB) was invited to attend this symposium and gave an oral presentation entitled "Impacts of the Three-Gorges Dam on microbial functions as revealed by comparative metagenomics".  

His presentation attracted widespread interests and extensive discussion. The work he presented is a cooperative study finished by three research groups from the IHB (i.e., Research Group of Taxonomy and Ecology of Protozoa, Research Group of Algal Ecology, Research group of Algae Taxonomy and Resources Utilization) and the Institute for Environmental Genomics from USA. This study revealed the possible impacts of the Three-Gorges Dam on the functions of bacterioplankton using the three metagenomic methods (i.e., GeoChip 5.0, 16S rRNA gene sequencing, and metagenomic shotgun sequencing).   

The International Symposium on Microbial Ecology was organized by the International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISME) every two years, and the next Symposium (i.e., ISME16) will be held in 2016 at Montreal, Canada.