Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) Research Focus Microbiome
Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) Research Focus Microbiome
Podcast Description
An emerging concept in science and medicine is the microbiome, a term referring to a community of microorganisms - in soil, aquatic ecosystems, or associated with plant and animal hosts - which provide unique functional traits ensuring life on earth. These communities have only recently been appreciated as such.
Lab experiments demonstrate what might be predicted by evolution theory, namely that in direct, controlled competition, one microbe ‘wins’ and takes over a culture, precluding microbiome formation. How then do microbes strategise their physiology and behaviour so that their co-existence is possible? Qualitative and quantitative descriptions of microbial communities have led to new insights from ecology and environment to agriculture and crop yield to health and disease.
This Research Focus aims to take advantage of a comparative approach to identify common mechanisms concerning microbiome formation and functional stability and resilence. A second goal will be to understand how products of microbiota modify host organisms or environments. A long-range goal is to organise the local research community for future collaborative funding initiatives.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
Explores a range of topics including microbial ecology, gut microbiome health, and the interplay of microbes and their environments, with episodes such as examining the gut microbiome's influence on brain health and studies linking soil health to human microbiomes.
An emerging concept in science and medicine is the microbiome, a term referring to a community of microorganisms – in soil, aquatic ecosystems, or associated with plant and animal hosts – which provide unique functional traits ensuring life on earth. These communities have only recently been appreciated as such.
Lab experiments demonstrate what might be predicted by evolution theory, namely that in direct, controlled competition, one microbe ‘wins’ and takes over a culture, precluding microbiome formation. How then do microbes strategise their physiology and behaviour so that their co-existence is possible? Qualitative and quantitative descriptions of microbial communities have led to new insights from ecology and environment to agriculture and crop yield to health and disease.
This Research Focus aims to take advantage of a comparative approach to identify common mechanisms concerning microbiome formation and functional stability and resilence. A second goal will be to understand how products of microbiota modify host organisms or environments. A long-range goal is to organise the local research community for future collaborative funding initiatives.
The complexity of a microbiome is daunting. A human gut microbiome may have over 1,000 individual species of bacteria that co-exist stably over years or possibly over generations. We lack an understanding of the forces that contribute to this surprising stability. In this workshop, we will dive in and examine stripped down systems to test hypotheses on how the simplest microbiomes are defined and what mechanisms they use to remain stable. The example of the circadian clock − the biological timekeeping mechanism that sculpts our inner day − will be invoked to explore how a regular, systematic, daily stimulus shapes the composition of the gut microbiome of the mouse over the course of a day. | The keynote lecturer Javier A. Ceja-Navarro is Associate Professor for Biological Systems and Engineering at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
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