Natural microbial communities assemble through random processes, such as which species arrive in which order, or the environmental conditions present during assembly. These processes may impact community functions from maintaining the health of their mammalian hosts or decontaminating polluted soil. Harnessing and optimising these functions requires the development of engineering strategies to better control the environment, its colonisation, species composition and even the species’ genetic make-up. In this session, we will discuss work that is focusing on such attempts to rationally design function microbial consortia and to understanding how the structure of a community impacts its function.
Speakers:
Silvia DeMonte
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology
Germany
Modelling eco-evolutionary feedbacks in artificial selection of community function
Travis Gibson
Harvard Medical School
United States
Bottom up and top down approaches for building microbioal communities and learning their dynamics
Karna Gowda
The University of Chicago
United States
Genomic structure predicts metabolite dynamics in microbial communities
Sara Mitri
University of Lausanne
Switzerland
Artificially selecting small bacterial communities for improved pollutant degradation