From May 23rd to May 26th this year, the small world of the HiPoAF project stopped when we met up in Innsbruck for the ISAM2023 conference.
At this conference, we finally had the chance to meet one of the prominent members of the Anaerobic Fungi Network - Prof. Mostafa Elshahed - in person. His keynote talk and all the exhilarating discussions on anaerobic fungi at this conference were among the top highlights.
Naturally, the HiPoAF team also presented different projects. Akshay presented his research on growth inhibitors and promoters of anaerobic fungi. Markus Neurauter, a master's student at UIBK, presented his thesis project on using NIR and DART for the identification of anaerobic fungi strains.
And we had in total 4 poster presentations from the HiPoAF team:
Veronika presented her work on a novel activity marker for anaerobic fungi, Julia Veitengruber presented the work of LfL on the isolation of novel anaerobic fungi from Caviidae, Sophia presented her work on extra/intracellular DNA, and Julia Vinzelj presented her work on an HCR-FISH protocol for anaerobic fungi.
This brings us to another highlight of the conference: Sophia won the Best Poster Award!
But nothing can summarize the ISAM2023 experience better than the word cloud created by the participants on the last day!