Every year, Our Global COE program have organized international symposia. The event shown above is the third Global COE international symposium that was held in Aveiro, Portugal, from September 2 to 4, 2009. CMES, Japan and CESAM (Center for Environmental and Marine Studies), Aveiro University, Portugal have been collaborating since 2003 upon organotin pollution and bacteria resistant to organotin. So far, CMES has received two Ph D. students and a post doctoral fellow from Aveiro University. In addition, we are now planning to finalize an agreement on academic exchange between CMES and CESAM in January 2010, and further activities of collaboration and exchange of students are also expected. This symposium also became one of the great opportunities to strengthen our relationship and to plan our future research.

This symposium mainly focused on biological responses against chemical contaminants, and topics of the presentations were mostly about microbiological and toxicological aspects. The topics such as drug contamination and drug resistant bacteria, microbial transformation of contaminants, bioremediation, imposex, and biomarkers were also presented and discussed speakers including young scientists from Portugal, and some other countries from Europe and Asia made 27 oral and 38 poster presentations. Eleven invited lectures were also delivered to 75 participants. All through the symposium, active communications upon their research were seen among the young scientists, and we could really share fruitful three days.

The participants are from 14 countries, including Portugal, Japan, Taiwan, Hong-Kong, Thailand, Sri-Lanka, Germany, Finland, Spain, Italy, Denmark, the UK, France and Brazil, and the symposium came on in plenty of European atomosphere.

The award for the best oral presentation was given to Dr. Mei-Fang Chien, a post doctoral researcher of CMES, and the best poster award was given to Dr. Guo-Chun Ding, a participant from Germany.

Lastly, I would like to thank Profs. Sonia Mendo, Carlos Barroso, and Amadeu Soares, of CESAM, and all the Post Doctoral researchers and graduate students for their tremendous help in making this symposium a great success.

The Interdisciplinary Symposium titled: “Interdisciplinary Symposium -Biological responses to chemical contaminants: from molecular to community level- was held in Aveiro, Portugal during September 2-4, 2009 and successfully completed. This symposium was hosted by Ehime University Global Center of Excellence (COE) Program and organized by Aveiro University. There were 11 keynote lectures, 16 oral presentations, 38 poster presentations, and several participants attended the symposium.

In the first day, the opening session paid focused on the issue of antibiotics usage and the dissemination of antibiotics resistance in the environment. Prof. Suzuki from CMES summarized his research about the occurrence of antibiotic resistant bacteria (ARB) and resistance genes in relation to the contamination status in waters around Indochina. He reported that the occurrence rate of ARB show strong correlation to the concentrations of drugs. He concluded that each drug itself is a selective pressure to induce ARB corresponding to the compounds, and he has also expressed the importance of ecological insight for clearly understanding the diverse system of induction and dissemination of antibiotic resistant bacteria and resistance genes. Prof. Kornelia Smalla from Julius Kuhn Institute (JKI) (Germany) introduced her recent research regarding the effect of veterinary medicines on soil microbial communities due to manure fertilization. She discovered a novel class of low GC content plasmid which might correlate with the transfer of antibiotics resistance genes. The second session was regarding the aromatic compounds. Prof. Ji-Dong Gu from Hong Kong University (China) presented his research on a bacteria, Xanthobacter flavus PA1, which explained the enantioselective degradation and unidirectional chiral inversion of 2-phenylbutyric acid, an intermediate from linear alkylbenzene.

The session on the second day focused on the influence of the contaminants on the marine environment. Prof. Corina Ciocan from Susses University (UK) introduced an example of endocrine disruption of the mussel due to the organic contaminant in their ambient environment and the possible use of these mollusks for biomonitoring. Prof. Jose M. Ruiz from Coruna University (Spain) called our attention to maritime contamination including oil spill, atmospheric emissions from fuel burning, and toxicants from antifouling paints. Prof. Iwata of CMES explained his recent study in which the biological responses mediated by the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) were used to evaluate the potential risk of dioxin-like compounds (DLCs) to wildlife. The results indicated that the accumulation levels of DLCs in some populations of seals and water birds reached the levels sufficient to induce cytochrome P450 1A expression via AHR activation.

The concern of the last day in the symposium was about the practical applications and the latest techniques in environmental science. Prof. Chieh-Chen Huang from Nation Chung Hsing University (Taiwan) explained his research on analyzing the function of each mercury resistance gene and on investigating the availability of these genes in practical applications. The keynote lecture that Prof. Marko from Helsinki University (Finland) delivered was about the application of the whole-cell bioreporter for measuring the bioavailability of metals and xenobiotics. Prof. Newton C. M. Gomes from Aveiro University (Portugal) introduced the oncoming generation technique called parallel pyrosequencing and how it worked on investigating the rhizosphere microbial communities in oil polluted urban mangroves.

Active discussions were performed both after presentations and also during the time of poster presentation.