Speaker: Stefany Moreno-Gámez
Postdoc Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Broad Institute, USA
Presentation
Host: Toni Gabaldón
Node: Computational Biology
Date: Monday 21 November 2022, 16.00h
Place: Serratosa Room
IMPORTANT: For attendees outside the PCB community you must register at least 24h before the seminar.
Abstract
Most of our knowledge about the human microbiome comes from high-throughput metagenomic studies which have yielded large catalogues of bacterial species and genes that are correlated with health and disease. While useful, these catalogues offer limited insights on how bacteria interact with one another and respond to their environments, which is essential to understand the forces that shape community assembly and evolution in the human host. In this talk, I will present our work on resource utilization strategies in the gut microbiome and show how characterizing the physiology and ecological interactions of individual microbes can help us understand the evolution of strategies for fiber degradation. In particular, I will focus on the question of why strategies for private and public utilization of fibers coexist in the gut and will discuss the implications of this functional perspective for the development of fibers as prebiotics.