Today and tomorrow, the Biotweeps conference is happening!

@Biotweeps is a Twitter account that features a different biologist each week. Last year, they organized the first Biotweeps conference, where 60 scientists were tweeting about their work. You can read their tweets by looking for #BTCon17 on Twitter.

Today and tomorrow, the second installment of this conference is taking place, with – you guessed right! – the hashtag #BTCon18. I could not find how many presenters there were this year, but I was one of the invited “speakers”. Each speaker gave their talk entirely through tweets, and we all were given a time slot, just like at a regular conference. Regular speakers had a 15-min timeslot in which they could tweet 4-5 slides. Invited speakers could tweet as many tweets as they liked in a 30-min timeslot. You can read all the abstracts here.

My talk was about the vaginal microbiome. Here is my abstract:

2100 Invited presenter – Elisabeth Bik (@MicrobiomDigest)- uBiome San Francisco

The vaginal microbiome: Women and their microbial BFFs

The human body is home to complex communities of microbes: the human microbiome. Most of these microbes are bacteria, and most of these live in our gut. But vaginas contain microbes as well. Which microbes “down there” are our friends, and which are the ones that cause bacterial vaginosis, yeast infections, infertility, or cervical cancer? How can we keep vaginas healthy and happy, and what do we need to do in case of a microbial imbalance? If you are interested in science, have a vagina, or love vaginas owned by others, you do not want to miss this #BTCon18 thread.

If you want to read my “talk” (“tweepinar”?), you can start here.