Speaker
Description
Microbes are ubiquitous and play key roles in ecosystem functions. In nature, most microbes live in spatially structured multi-species communities. In such communities, cells live in close proximity and engage in a variety of metabolic interactions with neighbours. The overall metabolic potential of a microbial community is determined by the activities of individual cells and the interactions between cells in the local microenvironment. Given their large population sizes and short generation time, microbial communities rapidly mutate and evolve to adapt to the local microenvironment. During this process, a variety of mutants arise. When a mutation that alters a cell’s metabolic activity arises, it may change the interactions the cell has with its neighbours in the microenvironment. These influences can in turn feed back to indirectly change growth and metabolism of the mutated cell. Therefore, newly arising mutations can modify the local metabolic interactions in the microenvironment. The growth of the mutants relative to its neighbours will determine whether or not they will increase in frequency. At present, we do not have a good experimental framework to study what happens when a mutant with altered metabolism emerges in a resident population of spatially organised microbes and to measure the growth and survival of the mutated individual as a function of its cellular neighbourhood.
I use a combination of bottom up quantitative experimental and modelling approaches to study this. In my presentation, I will discuss the experimental set up, the key questions I am interested in testing and the approaches I use to study these questions.
