Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology

Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology
Founded	December 29, 1949
Founder	Walter Ezekiel, Charles Thom, and Charles L. Porter
Type	PO
Focus	Microbiology, especially applications in industrial products, biotechnology, materials, and processes
Location	Fairfax, Virginia;
Origins	Advertised meeting at AAAS conference in New York City
Area served	Worldwide
Method	Conferences, Publications
Key people	Noel Fong, President Nigel Mouncey, President-Elect Steve Decker, Past-President Christine Lowe, Executive Director
Website	www.simbhq.org

The Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology (SIMB) is a nonprofit, international association dedicated to the advancement of microbiological sciences, especially as they apply to industrial products, biotechnology, materials, and processes. SIMB promotes the exchange of scientific information through its meetings and publications, and serves as liaison among the specialized fields of microbiology. SIMB was established in 1949 as the Society for Industrial Microbiology (SIM) by Walter Ezekiel, Charles Thom, and Charles L. Porter.^[1]

Governance

The SIMB is governed by a Constitution and Bylaws. The membership of SIMB elects a Board of Directors that consists of a President, President-Elect, Past-President, Secretary, Treasurer and four Directors.^[2]

Publications

SIMB has two publications, the Journal of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology and SIMB News.^[3]

Scientific Meetings

SIMB Annual Meeting^[4]

Symposium on Biomaterials, Fuels and Chemicals (SBFC)^[5]

The first Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals was held in 1978 and hosted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge, TN). It was the first technical meeting focusing exclusively on the biotechnologically-‐mediated conversion of renewable feedstocks, especially lignocellulosic plant biomass, to fuels and chemicals. This annual meeting soon became large enough to be co-‐hosted by the predecessor of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (Golden, CO) and the Symposium's location alternated yearly between Tennessee and Colorado. In 2008, SIMB began handling the logistics of the meeting and locations were expanded to include other states, with the Symposium being held in alternate years in the eastern or western United States.

Recent Advances in Fermentation Technology (RAFT)^[6]

Industrial Microbiology Meets Microbiome (IMMM)^[7]

Natural Products^[8]

Although there has been a steady decline in natural product discovery efforts in the pharmaceutical industry over the last three decades, natural product chemical scaffolds have continued to yield important human antimicrobial agents, immunomodulators, and antitumor agents, as well as plant crop protectants. Natural product discovery is currently undergoing a renaissance based to a large extent on the observations from microbial genome sequencing projects indicating that only a fraction of the potential microbial secondary metabolites from actinomycetes, other eubacteria, and fungi have been discovered so far, and that most secondary metabolite pathways are not expressed under normal laboratory growth conditions. However, the new discipline of “genome mining” has been exploring ways to activate the expression of these “cryptic pathways.”