Special Meeting Sections for the 7th Conference on Beneficial Microbes

EDITORIAL

In this issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, we are pleased to present sections devoted to the 7th Conference on Beneficial Microbes, which was held in Madison, Wisconsin, 8 to 11 July 2018. We are featuring contributions from conference presenters that include a meeting review, four research articles, two minireviews, and a creative cover image. I am grateful to the authors and the reviewers who made this special issue possible.

The Beneficial Microbes conference series began in 2001 as a large workshop to draw attention to the varied and important ways in which microbes are beneficial for hosts. As that overarching theme has become mainstream and meetings more focused on subtopics in this area have arisen, the Conference on Beneficial Microbes has drawn strength by not narrowing its field of view. At this conference, the microbes covered may represent complex consortia or single-species symbionts, they may be obligate mutualists or opportunistic pathogens, and their hosts could be anything from a human community to a tropical plant or a rock lobster. The research topics encompass applied and basic model systems, with questions spanning molecular mechanisms and community ecology. The conference continues to offer scientists with wide-ranging interests in host-microbe interactions an outstanding opportunity to broaden their knowledge base and to make comparative connections.

Organizers and attendees at this iteration of the conference also mirrored a notable attribute of many established microbial communities by showing resilience to changing conditions. Faced with uncertain funding and organizational prospects due to revisions in the conferences program at the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), conference co-chairs Mark Mandel (University of Wisconsin—Madison) and Karen Guillemin (University of Oregon) dedicated themselves to moving the meeting forward by pioneering a new organizational model. In the end, the diverse professional symbiotic web that defines this conference proved as durable as any microbial mutualism. With over 300 attendees and an outstanding array of talks and posters spread out over 4 days, the conference was as excellent as ever. I hope the meeting overview and other contributions published here will give readers some sense of the intellectual breadth on display at the Seventh Conference on Beneficial Microbes.