virtuelles Seminar: Life in the crowd: Deciphering microbial communities

Microbes usually don't live isolated but in large communities. Despite the importance of these communities for our health and well being, we have a very limited understanding of how these communities mechanistically work. A central factor that shapes microbial assemblages are the interactions between the microbes. In our work it turned out that by understanding microbial interactions also the behavior of communities can be understood and even predicted in many cases. In this talk I will show how microbial interactions within a population can cause spatial self-organization and can drive whole communities extinct. Based on these findings interactions between different species could be understood and even predicted. Finally, the concepts developed on simple communities were transferred to complex, natural systems to understand how interactions determine biodiversity and stability. Overall these findings show, that despite the enormous complexity of microbial communities we can develop a conceptual and systemic understanding of these systems.

If you would like to participate, please ask Britta Baron (baron@evolbio.mpg.de) for the access link and password.