Day 1 Atlanta

Yesterday was the first day of the conference and my itinerary was full. It started out with a symposium titled “To Grow or Not Grow: Tactics and Strategies of Uncultivated Microorganisms”. I enjoyed the first talk on high throughput cultivation and Dr. Schmidt’s talk on trade offs between power and efficiency. The talk on persister cells is also interesting. The persister cells are a variation of a wild-type that was treated with an antibiotic that it is susceptible to. It is not resistant to the antibiotic as when it is treated with antibiotic, the numbers will decrease to leave another batch of persister cells. It is a phenotypic variation of the same strain of bacteria. The two remaining talks on resuscitation of dormant cells and the great plate count anomaly was not very convincing to me. If the presence of cultivable variant is required for the resuscitation of the noncultivable variant, then why isn’t most of the late colonies similar to the early colonies? Why are they of different species or even genus? I still think there are more evidence required before the idea can be widely accepted.

Went to the CNN Center for lunch – had Black Bean burrito which was really good. The weather was really hot and humid, almost like Malaysian weather but not as burning. We then went to explore the Student Lounge and found out that they serve free lunch there. But since we already had lunch, we just got some desserts, which were really good – it was a rich chocolate brownie! It was still early after we finished so we went down to look at more posters and later went for the afternoon seminar session. It was about Marine Microbial Diversity, which I thought was very interesting. In fact, the seminar and the poster session for that afternoon had inspired me to start considering looking at aquatic environment. Furthermore, it might be more applicable in the future since Malaysia is surrounded by aquatic environment.

The afternoon session finished around 5pm and we went back to Steph’s hotel – Super 8 motel. We freshen up and walked around downtown Atlanta. We intended to explore the merchandise mart which we saw on the map but unfortunately, it seems like the building is some office building with displays of all the merchandise company they have around here. So we ended up just walking aimlessly around downtown and when we got to some area with lots of people loitering around (kinda like Petaling Street, Kota Raya area), we decided to turn around and go get some dinner because it was getting dark and we didn’t feel very safe there.

Choosing a place for dinner wasn’t that hard because most of the places closed at 6pm. We didn’t want to go to Quiznos, which seems to be at every corner here in Atlanta, McDonalds or Hooters, which would be very inappropriate because it was just me and Steph. So we ended up going back to Hard Rock Café. I had a Caesar salad, which was really good and wasn’t too filling.

So that was my busy Monday. Full of science but I had fun too.

~great time~