Speaker
Description
Communities of interacting microbes perform fundamental processes on Earth. These processes arise from a dense network of interactions between individual cells. Most microbial communities are spatially structured systems, where cells move little, thus interactions occur mostly between cells close in space. Therefore, the spatial arrangement of different species can affect the processes that the whole community performs. Our goal is to uncover how the local interactions between cells determine community-level processes. To do so, we look at synthetic bacterial communities under the microscope at a resolution that allows me to observe both the individual cells and the community as a whole. We measure properties of the single cells, like their growth and their phenotype, and we use mathematical modeling to uncover how these individual-level properties determine community-level properties.
