Urinary Microbiome Past, Present and Future: How recent discoveries can shape our management of UTIs

March 12, 2022

Prof. Alan Wolfe, MS, PhD and Director of the Wolfe Lab on female bladder microbiome at Loyola University Chicago, presents a 40 minute presentation followed by 20 minutes of questions on the topic of Urinary Microbiome Past, Present and Future: How recent discoveries can shape our management of UTIs.

AUDIENCE

Health Care Professionals including physicians, lab scientists and all mid-level providers. MDs, DOs, RNs, PAs and MLS.

TOPICS

  • Urine is not sterile: a short history of urinary tract research

  • Diagnostic tools for detecting urinary bacteria: The Standard Urine Culture versus more sensitive modern methods

  • The urobiome: what microbes do we detect in the bladder and how do these communities change over time?

  • Differences between symptomatic vs asymptomatic subjects

  • Is a urinary tract infection always an infection?

  • Some recent discoveries

SCIENTIFIC REFERENCES

References for the lecture can be found in Prof. Wolfe’s reading list.

BIOGRAPHY

Prof. Alan Wolfe, MS, PhD is a Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Loyola University Graduate School in Chicago. He is the Co-Founder/Director of the Loyola Urinary Education and Research Collaborative (LUEREC), and the Founder of the Wolfe Lab, which studies the female bladder microbiome and its impact on women’s health and disease, as well as protein acetylation in bacteria and its impact on transcription and other cellular processes.

Prof. Wolfe also serves as the Director of the Loyola Genomics Facility and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.

He was named Loyola University Chicago’s Graduate Faculty Member of the Year in 2007 and again Faculty of the Year in 2016.

Prof. Wolfe obtained a Masters of Science in System Engineering and a PhD in Genetics from the University of Arizona. Following his studies, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech). He later continued his research at Harvard University. In both positions he worked under Howard Berg, studying how bacterial cells sense and respond to their environment and the motility of the bacterium Escherichia coli.