Abstract:
Metabolic engineering has shifted from its earlier focus on flux balances in individual microbes to the complex assembly of multispecies communities, often mimicking natural communities like the gut microbiome. The ability to design and assemble such communities has broad applications in the chemical industry, as well as in healthcare, biotechnology, and agriculture. A key challenge is the complex nature of the underlying interactions between the species in a community, which remain difficult to unravel and manipulate, precluding the elucidation of general principles for community assembly. In this talk, he will present two approaches we have developed, which lie at the two ends of the spectrum of interaction scales involved, to address this challenge. In the first approach, we constructed a mean-field approximation that helps estimate effective pairwise interactions between species, allowing accurate prediction of structures of large communities, which are intractable with current methods. In the second approach, we derived a method based on a conceptual partitioning of resources that helps delineate the net interactions between species into their cooperative and competitive components, offering a more fundamental characterization of species interactions than the prevalent paradigm. I will discuss how these approaches advance our efforts to assemble stable multispecies communities, drawing connects to representative oral, gut, and soil microbial communities.
Brief bio of the speaker:
Narendra Dixit is a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and an associate faculty member in the Department of Bioengineering at IISc. He got his BTech from IIT Bombay and MS and PhD from UIUC, all in chemical engineering. He did postdoctoral studies at the Los Alamos National Lab before joining IISc. His interests are in computational biology, focusing on infectious diseases and microbiomes. He has been a senior fellow of the DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance, is a fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and serves on the editorial board of PLoS Computational Biology.
Webpage : https://chemeng.iisc.ac.in/faculty/narendra-m-dixit/
Google scholar link : https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=B8V_W8gAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao