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SUMMARY:EESS talk on "Model-guided approaches for mapping and designing mi
 crobial interactions"
DTSTART:20250930T121500
DTEND:20250930T131500
DTSTAMP:20260407T212057Z
UID:8e114ece434ae0d2bb0f4a42fb5f952350768d6c6253f5bebb5ecdc9
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Dr. Alan Pacheco\, Université de Lausanne\nAbstract:\nMicrobi
 ota are essential to the health and function of living systems. Though adv
 ances in DNA sequencing have allowed us to identify many of the organisms 
 that make up these microbial communities\, substantial challenges remain i
 n understanding the complex networks of interspecies metabolic interaction
 s they exhibit. These interactions are crucial to community assembly and a
 re highly context dependent: for example\, the availability of different r
 esources can influence whether certain microbes will interact cooperativel
 y or competitively\, which can drastically change a community’s structur
 e and function. Disentangling the factors that determine these outcomes wi
 ll not only shed light on how interspecies interactions scale to influence
  community assembly\, but can also unlock strategies to engineer microbiot
 a with desired properties. Here\, I outline how integrating mathematical m
 odeling with in vitro and plant-associated experiments has allowed us to e
 xplore the dependence of microbial community ecology on metabolic interact
 ions. I then share how we have leveraged this connection to produce valida
 ted predictions of community stable states\, informing microbiota engineer
 ing applications for host health.\n\n\n\nBiography:\nDr. Alan Pacheco join
 s 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 un
 derstand and engineer metabolic interactions in microbial communities. By 
 developing a mechanistic understanding of how environmental microbes utili
 ze and exchange resources\, they seek to contextualize the emergence of co
 mplex interaction networks at the ecosystem scale\, with the goal of ratio
 nally modulating community structure and function in host-associated micro
 biomes. Dr. Pacheco carried out his postdoctoral research in the group of 
 Julia Vorholt at ETH Zurich\, where he combined synthetic community experi
 ments with metabolic modeling to understand interactions among plant-assoc
 iated bacteria. He completed his Ph.D. in bioinformatics in the group of D
 aniel Segrè at Boston University\, where he developed principles for engi
 neering synthetic microbial communities via metabolic interactions.\n\n 
LOCATION:GC B1 10 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==GC%20B1%2010 https://epfl.zo
 om.us/j/69011077410
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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