Davis Complexity Group ~ Alan Pacheco "Learning from complex interactions in the microbial world"
Channel: Complexity Weekend
Date: 2021-03-31

Abstract:
Microbiomes are essential to the health of living systems - from the human gut to coral reefs. Though we can now catalogue many of the different organisms that make up these microbial communities, significant challenges remain in understanding the complex networks of interspecies interactions they exhibit. These interactions are crucial to community function, and are highly context-dependent. For example, the availability of different nutrients can determine whether microbes will interact cooperatively or competitively, which can drastically change a community’s structure. Disentangling these relationships between environment and phenotype will not only enhance our knowledge of microbial ecology, but will also bring us closer to the rational engineering of synthetic microbiomes with novel functions. In this talk, I will describe our work that integrates modeling and experimental approaches to quantify the complex interplay between microbes and their environment. I will then discuss how we can learn from this relationship to facilitate the design of synthetic microbial consortia.