International Microbial Biotechnology Conference and Workshop on Metagenome: Microbes For A Beautiful and Prosperous World (Jakarta, 11-13 November 2008)

11/11/2008 12:00:00 AM

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Background
In recent years, the world has faced several critical issues such as global warming, food and energy crisis, and emerging infectious diseases. All of these issues could lead the world into serious global crisis in food, environment, and health sectors. Biofuel is expected to reduce greenhouse gasses which resulted in rapid proliferation of research on biofuels. Increasing demand for biofuel directly has shifted the application of certain crops from food to biofuel. As a result, the production of food plant can not meet the demand and might lead into global food crisis especially in the developing countries.

Besides global warming and food crisis, the world has also faced a number of emerging infectious diseases, such as avian influenza. The spread of avian influenza has raised special concerns since it could develop capacity for human to human transmission. On the other hand, there is also a trend in increasing global consumption of functional foods; such as food containing probiotic. This practice might increase immune system through cell-cell interactions of normal microbiota and macroorganism cells inside the digestive tracts. However, a better understanding and further development still need to be performed to optimally extract the benefit of probiotic foods. Furthermore, enzymes derived from microbes would play important roles in our quest to utilize non-starch polysaccharides for novel food, feed, and bioenergy.

Indonesia, as one of mega diverse country in world, might have a great contribution to provide solution for global issues through its mega diverse microorganisms. However, a large portion of this diversity has not been studied. Modern biotechnology would be an essential tool to explore and turn these hidden microscopic biodiversity into “biodiamonds”. This conference will expose several key findings in microbial biotechnology that might be suitable to direct our research for a whole new better world.

Microorganisms as a major component of our planet sustainability have an importance and beneficial role for solving world’s problems. Sometimes their role has not been realized or even worse an appreciation of their diversity and distribution has not been known due to the limitation for learning and evaluating. Through Microbial metagenome workshop, not only our understanding in microbial diversity will be significantly improved but also our approaches will be optimally used to harvest microorganisms for solving world’s problems.

Participants
The conference and workshop participants are university students and lecturers, professionals from government research institutions, private sectors, and non-government organization. Policy-or decision-makers in biotechnology-based sectors will also benefit from attending this conference and workshop. The workshop will be limited to a maximum 50 participants.

Paper Submission
Participants are invited to submit short paper for poster presentation. The short paper must be submitted by e-mail to imbc_2008@yahoo.com before 20 September 2008. The announcement of accepted paper will be notified to first author by 30 September 2008.

Short Paper and Poster Guidelines
Paper must be written in English on MS Word (doc) file with 12pt Times New Roman font and 1.5 line spacing. The paper should contain Title, Authors, Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion, Conclusions, References (max 4 of the most relevant references), keywords, maximum 2 pages long. Poster should be approx 90 cm wide and 120 cm high. It should contain the title, name all authors, institutional affiliation abstract, introductions, methods, results and discussion, conclusions, and references.

Venue
IMBC 2008 will be held in Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia which is located in the heart of Jakarta, capital city of Indonesia. As national capital, Jakarta is home of many national finest research institutions, educational facilities, and heritage site. The famous and interesting heritage site in Jakarta is Indonesia Miniature Park (TMII), which is located at east side of Jakarta. TMII represents culture heritage of 30 provinces in Indonesia through finest exhibition of ethnic and traditional architecture, handicraft museum, and famous snail-shaped IMAX Theater (Keong Mas). Besides heritage site in East jakarta, there is also Monumen Nasional (Monas) in the center of Jakarta. It is a 137 meters tall obelisk with 35 kg gold on its top as representative of people’s determination to achieve freedom. Nearby Monas, you could also visit National Museum where collections of famous heritage statues are located. Other interesting place you can visit near Jakarta is Historical World Botanical Garden in Bogor. This lush tropical garden is home of exotic and rare botanical collections that can be reached less than 1 hour drive from Jakarta.

 

Sponsorship

We, the organizing committee, would like to invite you to become a part of us in IMBC 2008 conference and workshop through sponsorship program. The sponsorship program will gain you a maximum access to an interested and influential of speakers and participants whom you can meet during and after events. There are 4 categorize sponsor and other side opportunities that might provide you beneficial opportunities in participating IMBC 2008 conference and workshop. For further information regarding IMBC 2008 sponsorship, please contact Yolena Handoyo ( 62-81932928087) or Lakshmi Sandhow ( 62-8121000931).

 

IMBC 2008 Schedule
(Please visit www.imbc-indonesia.com for updates)

 Tuesday, 11 November 2008