QLS Seminar - Monday, 22 January 11h00: "The ecology of the gut microbiome" by KC Huang

[Quantitative Life Sciences]

Dear All,

On Monday, 22 January 2024 at 11h00 CET, KC Huang (Stanford U.) will 
give a seminar titled:

*The ecology of the gut microbiome
*

_Abstract:_

  Microbiota dynamics arise from a plethora of interspecies 
interactions, including resource competition, cross-feeding, and pH 
modulation. The individual contributions of these mechanisms are 
challenging to untangle, especially in natural or complex laboratory 
environments where the landscape of resource competition is unclear.

First, I will discuss how we developed a framework to estimate the 
extent of multi-species niche overlaps by combining metabolomics data of 
individual species, growth measurements in pairwise spent media, and 
mathematical models. When applied to an in vitro model system of human 
gut commensals in complex media, our framework revealed that a simple 
model of resource competition described most pairwise interactions. By 
grouping metabolomic features depleted by the same set of species, we 
constructed a coarse-grained consumer-resource model that predicted 
assembly compositions to reasonable accuracy.

Next, I will show how dose dependence can arise between closely related 
organisms as long as competition is sufficiently intense. Finally, I 
will discuss our recent efforts to explore spatial variation along the 
human intestinal tract, and how that informs our understanding of the 
gut environment.

_
_
_The seminar will take place in the *Common area*, Ex SISSA building, 
Second floor, via Beirut 2
_ _
_Indico webpage: https://indico.ictp.it/event/10621/
__
You are all most welcome to attend!

Best regards,
Erica

-- 
Erica Sarnataro
Group Secretary
Quantitative Life Sciences
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
Trieste,  Italy
Tel. +39-040-2240623
www.ictp.it/research/qls.aspx
e-mail:qls at ictp.it