Last month, the Society held its Annual Conference, which was held in Birmingham this year. It was a great event: over a thousand delegates attended, presenting hundreds of talks and posters. We spoke to some of the attendees about their work for this month’s podcast.

Firstly, we chatted with Dr Jennifer Gardy from the BC Centre for Disease Control in Canada, who told us about her role in the Society’s new journal Microbial Genomics and about the field of genomics in general.

Next up was Professor David Minnikin from the University of Birmingham, who is researching the origins of tuberculosis, which appears to have begun as an infection of ancient animals in the Pleistocene era.

Dr Nick Loman, also from the University of Birmingham, who told us about his work using a seriously tiny DNA sequencing machine.

Finally, Karl Dunne from, you guessed it, the University of Birmingham, talked about his PhD research, which has seen him sequence the first sample of E. coli bacteria, isolated by Theodor Escherich.

Image credit: Bob Hall on Flickr under CC BY-SA 2.0