BISMiS Live

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.

Biosketch: Prof. Rup Lal is an INSA Senior Scientist at the University of Delhi and a Fellow of FAAM, INSA, FNASc, FNAAS, and FAMSc. He served as the ASM Ambassador for India (2012-2015) and is currently the ISME and FEMS Ambassador to India, as well as the Ambassador to the IMiLI-South Asia Centre (IMiLI-SAC).
Prof. Lal began his academic career as a lecturer at Sri Venkateswara College, New Delhi, in 1979 and joined the Department of Zoology at the University of Delhi in 1992. He has held key positions, including Head of the Department, Warden and Provost of PG Men's and Mansarovar Hostels, Dean of the Faculty of Science, Chairman of BRS, and Dean of Examinations, retiring in 2018.
He has been a visiting scientist at renowned institutions such as the University of Cambridge, EPFL, ETH-EAWAG Zurich, and the University of Bielefeld. He has received prestigious fellowships, including the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, Indo-US-ASM Professorship in Microbiology, and the Australian Government Endeavour Executive Fellowship (2018-2019). His awards include the ASM Moselio Schaechter Distinguished Service Award, AMI Lifetime Achievement Award, Best ISME Ambassador Award (2022), and INSA Distinguished Lecture Fellowship (2024).
Prof. Lal served as Editor-in-Chief of the Indian Journal of Microbiology (2006-2013) and is on the editorial boards of mSystems, ISME-Communications, Environmental Microbiology/Reports, ASM Spectrum and others.
He has contributed to national and international committees, including CSIR, DBT, DST, and MOEF&CC, and was on the review committee for the ASM-IUSSTF Indo-US Professorship in Microbiology. Former President of the Association of Microbiologists of India (2013), he currently leads the Indian Network for Soil Contamination Research (INSCR).

Biosketch: Dr. Amit Yadav is Scientist at the National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS), Pune (INDIA), specializing in microbial taxonomy and genomics of both uncultivated and cultivable bacteria. His research spans phytoplasma biology and antimicrobial resistance (AMR), with a focus on genome-based systematics. His group was the first to report the genome-based characterization of ‘Candidatus Phytoplasma sacchari’. He has promoted taxogenomics in phytoplasma classification and, through a pivotal study on chimeric 16S rRNA sequences, exposed risks leading to critical taxonomic corrections. His team is decoding phytoplasma genomes, uncovering unique pathogenicity related features and lineage-specific effectors, and functionally characterizing these effectors to understand host manipulation and disease outcomes in Indian crops like sandalwood, sugarcane, and brinjal.

Biosketch: Chih-Horng Kuo received his PhD from the University of Georgia in 2008 and has served as a principal investigator at Academia Sinica since 2010. His research focuses on the evolutionary and functional genomics of host-associated bacteria, with the goal of understanding how genetic changes shape bacterial diversity and adaptation.
To investigate the evolutionary processes and genetic mechanisms underlying extant bacterial diversity, he utilizes omics and bioinformatics tools to perform comparative analyses across bacteria with diverse phenotypes. Once candidate genes for adaptation are predicted, experimental approaches are employed to characterize their functions. His research emphasizes an integrative framework that often involves collaboration across disciplines, connecting evolutionary patterns with mechanistic insights.
In Mollicutes, his work has revealed extensive genome diversity among insect-symbiotic Spiroplasma, convergent evolution in ruminant-pathogenic Mycoplasma, and molecular mechanisms by which plant-pathogenic phytoplasmas manipulate their hosts. In agrobacteria, he has dissected genomic and regulatory variation across species and strains with different host ranges, identifying both taxonomically and functionally meaningful patterns of divergence. Extending from evolutionary genomics, he has also contributed to taxonomic revisions of these bacteria, thereby improving scientific communication and enabling better tools for pathogen identification.
Beyond research, he actively contributes to the scientific community. He has served as a board member of the International Organization for Mycoplasmology since 2016, a member of the International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes (ICSP) Subcommittee on the Taxonomy of Mollicutes since 2017, and an editor for several international journals.

Biosketch: Cheng Lei obtained his PhD in 2011 from the College of Resources and Environment at China Agricultural University. He then returned the Biogas Institute of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, where he currently serves as a researcher and the principal investigator of the Anaerobic Microorganism team.
Dr. Cheng's research focuses on anaerobic microorganisms. He has developed a platform for the long-term preservation and high-throughput screening of these microorganisms. He proposed 20 novel high-level taxonomic units, including new orders and families within anaerobic microorganisms. Dr. Cheng isolated a methanogenic archaeon outside the Euryarchaeota (Nature, 2024), confirmed a new pathway for the direct degradation of crude oil to methane (Nature, 2022), and discovered a novel mode of syntrophic methane production between bacteria and archaea (Nature, 2025). He has published over 40 papers in both domestic and international journals.

Biosketch: Shuang-Jiang Liu, Ph.D., is a Principle Investigator at Institute of Microbiology of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and also Professors of Microbiology at University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing) and at Shandong University (Qingdao). He is the head of Gut Microbiome Branch of the Chinese Association of Biophysics. His research interest covers microbial diversity in natural environments and human gut, microbial degradation of and chemotaxis towards pollutants in environments, and the interactions of microbes with hosts.

Biosketch: Jian-Yu Jiao received his PhD in Ecology from Sun Yat-Sen University in 2019 and is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Life Sciences, Sun Yat-Sen University, China. His main research areas are microbial resources, ecology and evolution by using multi-omics approaches. His research focuses on microbial resources and ecology, with long-term interests in microbial diversity, ecological functions, and adaptive evolution in extreme environments such as hot springs. He has extensive experience in multi-omics approaches (metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, culturomics) and in the targeted isolation of microbial strains. Dr. Jiao has published over 30 papers as first or corresponding author in journals such as National Science Review, iMeta, The ISME Journal, and Microbiome, and has co-authored more than 60 additional publications. He has contributed to the description of 2 new phyla, 5 new classes, and over 80 new species. He has led or participated in 7 national-level research projects, edited or co-edited 2 books, and co-authored 3 chapters of Bergey’s Manual of Systematics of Archaea and Bacteria. He serves as a committee member of the International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISME), and the ISME Early Career Scientist. He is currently an Executive Associate Editor and Youth Editorial Board Member of iMeta, an Editorial Board Member of BMC Microbiology, Guest Associate Editor and Review Editor of Frontiers in Microbiology, and a Youth Editorial Board Member of Acta Microbiologica Sinica.