Science at the Edge
November 17, 2017
1400 Biomedical Physical Sciences
11:30 am
Jeff Gore Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Building
Microbial
Communities from the
Bottom Up
Microbes exist in complex, multi-species
communities with diverse interactions that play an essential role in both human health as well as the health of the planet. Over the last decade tremendous progress has been
made in characterizing these
communities, but the lack of experimentally tractable model systems has made it difficult to discern the rules governing
microbial
community
assembly and function. In this talk I will describe our recent experimental efforts to develop a
bottom-up approach to understanding the dynamics of these
communities. We have begun by quantifying the network of pairwise competitive outcomes among species within a model
microbial
community. We find that simple
assembly rules incorporating just these pairwise competitive outcomes are surprisingly successful in predicting the outcome of multi-species competition in multiple environments as well as within the gut of the worm, indicating that higher-order interactions
among species can often be neglected. These results are a first step towards a
bottom-up approach of predicting the emergent behavior within complex multi-species
communities.
Lerena R. Heintzelman
Department of Physics & Astronomy
Michigan State University
567 Wilson Rd. Room 3261
East Lansing, MI 48824
517-884-5513