Rules of microbial community assembly

Rules of microbial community assembly

  • Datum: 21.10.2021
  • Uhrzeit: 15:00
  • Vortragende(r): Dr. Sylvie Estrela, University of Yale, USA
  • For more information on Sylvie Estrela please see: https://sylvieestrela.weebly.com/
  • Ort: virtuelle Plattform
  • Gastgeber: Paul Rainey/ Loukas Theodosiou
  • Kontakt: theodosiou@evolbio.mpg.de

Predicting the composition and function of microbial communities in a given habitat is a major aspiration in microbiome biology. To realize this goal, it is critical to identify which features of microbial communities are reproducible and predictable, which are not, and why. We address these questions by studying the assembly of hundreds of microbial communities in simple replicate habitats and connecting the experiments with modeling. I will first present recent work where we show that microbial community assembly in glucose-limited habitats is generally reproducible and convergent at higher levels of taxonomic community organization and reflects an emergent metabolic self-organization between different functional groups whose ratios can be quantitatively explained with simple models. I will then show that in mixed nutrient environments, there are non-trivial regularities in how nutrients interact to shape the assembly of microbial communities that reflect generic patterns of nutrient dominance at higher levels of community organization.

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