CCSS Meeting #74: Learning microbiome design principles from natural variation
This lecture will be held in physical format at the CCSS Living Room (Min. 4.16) with lunch and refreshments provided. The theme of this CCSS Lunch Meeting is Resilience.
Speaker Overview
is an Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the 木瓜福利影视 of Chicago and a core member of the 木瓜福利影视鈥檚 Center for the Physics of Evolving Systems. He holds a BS magna cum laude in physics from Beloit College and a PhD in chemical physics from Cornell 木瓜福利影视. While at Cornell, he was honored with the Howard Neal Wachter Memorial Prize for excellence in physical chemistry and the Tunis Wentink Prize for outstanding PhD thesis.
Lecture Overview
Microbial communities exhibit complex dynamics driven by evolutionary, ecological, environmental processes. Despite this complexity, microbiomes retain reliable functional properties, such as the metabolic activities that drive global biogeochemical cycles. In order to design or predict microbiome function we need to understand how it emerges from eco-evolutionary processes playing out in dynamic natural environments. Using bacterial denitrification -- a key metabolic process in soil -- I will present results demonstrating how natural variation can be leveraged to understand the natural 'design' of functional microbiomes. First, I will briefly show how community-level metabolism can be predicted from genomes by exploiting natural variation in bacterial traits (Gowda et al. 2022). Next, I will show that genomically encoded traits and their ecological interactions contribute to conserved global patterns in gene content (Crocker et al. 2024). Finally, I will show that simple models and quantitative measurements can reveal the ecological mechanisms mediating the metabolic responses of soil microbiomes to environmental change. Collectively, these studies lay a path for looking to nature to understand how collective metabolic function in communities arises from evolved traits, ecological interactions, and environmental fluctuations.
There will be 45-min lecture from the speaker, followed by a 15-min discussion session.
To attend the lecture, please signup below before 15:00 on Wednesday June 25.
- Start date and time
- End date and time
- Location
- Physical Meeting >> CCSS Living Room, Room 4.16, Minneartgebouw
- Entrance fee
- FREE
- Registration