EESS talk on "Model-guided approaches for mapping and designing microbial interactions"
Event details
| Date | 30.09.2025 |
| Hour | 12:15 › 13:15 |
| Speaker | Dr. Alan Pacheco, Université de Lausanne |
| Location | Online |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
| Event Language | English |
Abstract:
Microbiota are essential to the health and function of living systems. Though advances in DNA sequencing have allowed us to identify many of the organisms that make up these microbial communities, substantial challenges remain in understanding the complex networks of interspecies metabolic interactions they exhibit. These interactions are crucial to community assembly and are highly context dependent: for example, the availability of different resources can influence whether certain microbes will interact cooperatively or competitively, which can drastically change a community’s structure and function. Disentangling the factors that determine these outcomes will not only shed light on how interspecies interactions scale to influence community assembly, but can also unlock strategies to engineer microbiota with desired properties. Here, I outline how integrating mathematical modeling with in vitro and plant-associated experiments has allowed us to explore the dependence of microbial community ecology on metabolic interactions. I then share how we have leveraged this connection to produce validated predictions of community stable states, informing microbiota engineering applications for host health.
Biography:
Dr. Alan Pacheco joins the Department of Fundamental Microbiology at the University of Lausanne as an assistant professor and Branco Weiss Fellow in September 2025. His group pairs computational modeling tools with laboratory experiments to understand and engineer metabolic interactions in microbial communities. By developing a mechanistic understanding of how environmental microbes utilize and exchange resources, they seek to contextualize the emergence of complex interaction networks at the ecosystem scale, with the goal of rationally modulating community structure and function in host-associated microbiomes. Dr. Pacheco carried out his postdoctoral research in the group of Julia Vorholt at ETH Zurich, where he combined synthetic community experiments with metabolic modeling to understand interactions among plant-associated bacteria. He completed his Ph.D. in bioinformatics in the group of Daniel Segrè at Boston University, where he developed principles for engineering synthetic microbial communities via metabolic interactions.
Microbiota are essential to the health and function of living systems. Though advances in DNA sequencing have allowed us to identify many of the organisms that make up these microbial communities, substantial challenges remain in understanding the complex networks of interspecies metabolic interactions they exhibit. These interactions are crucial to community assembly and are highly context dependent: for example, the availability of different resources can influence whether certain microbes will interact cooperatively or competitively, which can drastically change a community’s structure and function. Disentangling the factors that determine these outcomes will not only shed light on how interspecies interactions scale to influence community assembly, but can also unlock strategies to engineer microbiota with desired properties. Here, I outline how integrating mathematical modeling with in vitro and plant-associated experiments has allowed us to explore the dependence of microbial community ecology on metabolic interactions. I then share how we have leveraged this connection to produce validated predictions of community stable states, informing microbiota engineering applications for host health.
Biography:
Dr. Alan Pacheco joins the Department of Fundamental Microbiology at the University of Lausanne as an assistant professor and Branco Weiss Fellow in September 2025. His group pairs computational modeling tools with laboratory experiments to understand and engineer metabolic interactions in microbial communities. By developing a mechanistic understanding of how environmental microbes utilize and exchange resources, they seek to contextualize the emergence of complex interaction networks at the ecosystem scale, with the goal of rationally modulating community structure and function in host-associated microbiomes. Dr. Pacheco carried out his postdoctoral research in the group of Julia Vorholt at ETH Zurich, where he combined synthetic community experiments with metabolic modeling to understand interactions among plant-associated bacteria. He completed his Ph.D. in bioinformatics in the group of Daniel Segrè at Boston University, where he developed principles for engineering synthetic microbial communities via metabolic interactions.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
- This event is internal
Organizer
- EESS - IIE
Contact
- Prof. Wenyu Gu, MICROBE