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SUMMARY:EESS seminar talk on "Dynamic microbial interactions and coexisten
 ce in changing environments"
DTSTART:20260526T121500
DTEND:20260526T131500
DTSTAMP:20260411T062212Z
UID:c0c5f23040a0906f4aa1a4459ca4aa8acfab4b98bdb7cefc53441b42
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Dr. Anna Weiss\, Eawag\nAbstract:\n\n\nBacterial communities p
 lay central roles across natural and engineered systems\, contributing to 
 processes ranging from biogeochemical cycling to human health and environm
 ental management. Within these systems\, microbial communities shape and a
 re shaped by their environment through the exchange of metabolites\, signa
 ling molecules\, and other bioactive compounds. By modifying their local e
 nvironment\, microbes continuously alter the conditions that define how th
 ey interact\, creating a dynamic feedback between community activity and e
 nvironmental state. Yet\, so far many studies inferred microbial interacti
 ons from endpoint outcomes\, leaving dynamics of these feedbacks largely u
 nresolved.\nIn this talk\, I will present recent work using high-throughpu
 t\, time-resolved microdroplet approaches to quantify how bacterial intera
 ctions emerge and change across environmental conditions. By tracking the 
 dynamics of interacting populations\, we find that interactions are inhere
 ntly dynamic\, shifting between competitive\, neutral\, and beneficial ove
 r ecological timescales. These shifts follow characteristic trajectories t
 hat depend on the metabolic context and can be linked to underlying resour
 ce dynamics.\nBuilding on this\, we find that such temporally structured i
 nteraction dynamics can contribute to stable coexistence of bacteria\, for
  example through shifts in resource use and environmental modification tha
 t enable niche partitioning over time. Together\, this work aims to move t
 owards a more mechanistic understanding of how metabolic interactions and 
 environmental feedbacks shape both interaction dynamics and community stab
 ility\, with implications for microbial processes across natural and engin
 eered systems.\n\n\n\n\n\nBiography:\n\n\n\nDr. Anna Weiss is a microbial 
 ecologist and currently a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zürich and Eawag
 \, where she investigates how microbial interactions shape community funct
 ion and robustness. Trained at the interface of physics and microbiology\,
  her work combines synthetic bacterial communities\, microfluidics\, and s
 ingle-cell approaches with ecological theory to uncover the mechanisms und
 erlying interaction networks and functional robustness in microbiomes. She
  is a Walter Benjamin Fellow of the DFG and is particularly interested in 
 linking ecological principles to experimentally tractable microbial system
 s across environments.\n\n
LOCATION:ALP 1 107 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==ALP%201%20107 https://epfl.
 zoom.us/j/69011077410
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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