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William Shoemaker (The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics )
The human gut microbiome harbors astronomical quantities of genetic diversity across evolutionarily distant species. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that not all contributors towards said diversity are subject to evolutionary dynamics. Rather, genetic variants can be present in a host due to the co-occurrence of multiple genetically diverged lineages of a given species, a form of...
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Emil Mallmin (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology)
How ecological interactions can shape community assembly and maintenance is of particular interest for microbial communities, which are generically highly diverse, and where even closely related strains can have distinct ecologies. Statistical physics offers mathematical tools to deal with the complexity of diverse communities. In recent years, considerable progress has been made in the study...
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Istvan Scheuring (Centre for Ecological Research, Institute of Evolution)
Microbiomes provide key ecological functions to their host; however, most host-associated microbiomes are too complicated to allow a model of essential host-microbe-microbe interactions. The intestinal microbiota of salmonids may offer a solution since it is often characterized by few dominating species. Healthy fish coexist with a mutualistic Mycoplasma sp. species, while stress allows the...
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Gaurav Athreya (MPI for Evolutionary Biology)
The immense diversity observed in natural microbial communities is surprising in light of the competitive exclusion principle and the numerous weapons microbes have evolved to inhibit each other's growth. In this work, we study patterns of antibiotic-mediated interactions between microbes using classical models from theoretical ecology. Building on previous work, we analyse the ecological...
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Rahul Unni (MPI Evolutionary Biology)
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) comprises disorders characterized by chronic inflammation of the digestive tract and an altered gut microbiome. With the aim to test the hypothesis that disease-mediated changes in the intestinal environment impose different selection pressures on the microbiome, we performed an evolution experiment with Escherichia coli NC101 in a mouse model of IBD to study...
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Nandakishor Krishnankutty (Centre for Ecological Research, Budapest )
The existence of an Evolutionarily Stable State (ESS) in a host-symbiont interaction at ecologically stable coexistence is studied in the framework of eco-evolutionary dynamics. Our basic objective is to obtain an evolutionary insight into the transmission behaviour of symbionts (which can be either parasitic or mutualistic depending on effects on mortality and fecundity) which are obligate...
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Nancy Obeng (CAU Kiel)
Authors: Nancy Obeng and Hinrich Schulenburg
Commonly microbiotas are composed of bacteria from different taxa that may differ in their functional repertoires. To associate with the host, they must enter and persist in a host, and often grow or survive in environmental reservoirs, thus following a biphasic life cycle. To what extent species co-inhabiting a host differ in their life history...
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Marco Mauri (Friedrich-Schiller University Jena )
Marine phytoplankton is composed of unicellular algae and their associated bacteria. These algal communities are highly variable in species composition, but their patterns tend to recur seasonally. This diversity suggests the existence of ecological niches for the associated bacteria. To clarify the role of the bacterial community on the phytoplankton, we co-cultured several bacterial species...
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Karlis Moors (CAU Kiel)
Caenorhabditis elegans is an important model organism in biology and medicine. Despite its wide use, the microbiome of this nematode has generally not been taken into consideration. Recent efforts have characterized the native microbiome of wild C. elegans. Zimmerman et al. developed 77 metabolic models of the bacterial microbiota members associated with C. elegans in a natural setting using...
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Aurore Picot (CIRB, Collège de France & CNRS)
Commensal bacteria are also often major opportunistic pathogens with important public health consequences. For example, Escherichia coli colonises the gut of all humans and occasionally causes intestinal and extra-intestinal infections responsible for ~1M deaths worldwide each year. The colonization of hosts by E. coli is a highly dynamical process with strain turnover in the gut over...
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Jan Taubenheim (UKSH Kiel)
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is characterized by chronic inflammations of the gastric tract leading to severe gastrointestinal symptoms and reduced quality of life for patients. The causes of IBD are unknown to date but result in an overly active immune response in the gut. It is believed that the change in the microbial composition in the intestinal tract contributes to the onset and...
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David Versluis (Leiden University )
(1) Institute of Biology, Leiden University (2) Mathematical Institute, Leiden University (3) FrieslandCampina, Amersfoort Nearly immediately after birth, a complex and dynamic ecosystem forms in the human infant gut. The characteristics of this system influence the infant's health in both the short and long term. Oligosaccharides in nutrition and in the mucus that lines the gut wall strongly...
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Laura van Schijndel (WUR)
Intercropping is an agricultural practice in which multiple crop species are grown together in the same field. Some plant combinations benefit from being intercropped, for instance leading to increased yield or better resistance against drought or pathogens. The mechanisms behind these benefits are largely unknown, but the soil microbial community is thought to be involved. Since the soil...
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Matan Markfeld (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)
Habitat degradation, including the change of natural habitats into agricultural areas, alters natural communities all over the world. Land-use change may affect the host and its microbiome composition and structure, thus influencing the host's function and health, and the potential transmission and spread of microbes and disease. However, the relative effect of land-use change in shaping the...
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