My talk at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of visiting The House that microbiologist Carl Woese Built - The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With nearly a 100 evolutionary biologists and ecologists along with National Academy Members sprinkled across the integrative departments, its a wonder world of life sciences research. Indeed, famed virus hunter Nathan Wolfe happened to be visiting the campus the same day.

Here's my seminar on The Hologenome / Speciation by Symbiosis (Part I: 0 to 31:20) and Microbial Genome Evolution (Part II: 31:20 to Q&A). I usually am hypercritical of my own talks and find all sorts of things wrong with them. This seminar is perhaps the one time that the talk went off without a hitch. I even landed a few laughs with a joke on hybrid lethality (phew).

Related blog posts:
1. The story behind Speciation by Symbiosis? (April 26, 2012)
2. Is the microbiome part of the organism or the environment? (May 11, 2012)
3. Is the microbiota species specific? (June 23, 2012)

4. ASM's "Small Things Considered" spotlights the Speciation by Symbiosis article (August 16, 2012)