Summary reposted from the MSE newsletter, now hosted by AMI! Subscribe to the newletter or join the group here.

MSE recently hosted its 5th annual summit, this year dedicated to exploring the concept of Microbiome Stewardship. Microbiome Stewardship is a concept that is intended to provide guiding insights, articulate responsibilities, and suggest practices aimed at maintaining microbial biodiversity and microbiome functioning across microbial habitats, which, in turn, supports the health and well-being of humans, animals, plants, and ecosystems. The summit consisted of two days of presentations (webinars) and two days of virtual workshop discussions.

We opened with two days of webinars featuring 12 speakers from wide-ranging fields of expertise, all focused on how social or environmental conditions impact health and microbiomes. This included an introduction to the concept of microbiome stewardship and guiding principles for its implementation, the need for diversification of fecal microbiome donors for health interventions, degradation of waterways and microbial transfer, the industrialization of food systems and the rise of antimicrobial resistance, the use of too-vague population descriptors in microbiome science, integrating systems-level thinking in microbiology curricula, and working with Indigenous communities on microbiome research. The webinars sparked imaginative and thoughtful questions from the 200 attendees (nearly 300 registrants), and set the stage for the subsequent two days of workshops. We also shared a working draft of the Microbiome Stewardship Guiding Principles document with attendees, and welcomed feedback. We hope to submit that manuscript for peer review and publication soon.

Workshop attendance was by application, and restricted to 50 attendees across the two days, which focused on host and environmental microbiomes, respectively. For each workshop day, attendees self-organized into breakout rooms focusing on different disciplines or themes. Speakers, MSE and Microbiome Stewardship researchers, and attendees discussed the challenges and opportunities for their respective fields, what was needed to achieve more integration between research and education or policy, and how to incorporate the principles of stewardship into their respective research. These conversations helped realize existing areas of  overlap between our work, and identify compatible expertise that was needed to explore these interdisciplinary research questions. Similar themes and challenges emerged across workshop days and discussion groups, highlighting opportunities to strengthen the microbiome stewardship and paths to implementation.

The live sessions were recorded to accommodate our global audience who were unable to make the session, and can be viewed here. While the workshops were not recorded, the thoughtful discourse from throughout the seminar and workshops will be used to inform that guiding principles publication-in-development, as well as future publications and output over the next 2-3 years from the collaborations which germinated during the breakout room sessions.