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Ana-Hermina Ghenu (Institute for Ecology and Evolution, University of Bern)12/07/2023, 17:00
Soil bacteria are critical for sustaining ecosystem functions and services. Recent studies show that soil bacterial communities are susceptible to climate change, particularly to extreme climatic events. Yet, we know little about the biotic mechanisms through which extreme climatic events, such as heat waves, restructure soil bacterial communities. Previous studies indicate that slower growing...
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Gisela Rodriguez (Microbial Population Biology Department)12/07/2023, 17:00
Glacial retreats represent a unique opportunity to study primary successional processes. The new exposed rock is a new material for the assembly of a new ecosystem. Soil formation after glacial retreat is strongly influenced by plant colonization, but this colonization depends on nutrient availability. An ongoing project in the forefront of the last Venezuelan glacier has established a...
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Alejandra Ramirez12/07/2023, 17:00
Evolutionary game dynamics is a framework used to model the evolution of strategies in a population. For finite populations, dynamics that appear to lack a pattern or principle of organisation can arise from sources like demographic noise and chaos. The former refers to the stochasticity caused by the probabilistic nature of birth and death events, while the latter is related to deterministic...
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Alyssa Henderson12/07/2023, 17:00
Microbes live in complex communities, where they continuously engage in a range of interactions with other microbes. One class of interactions is the exchange of metabolites, where one microbe synthesises a compound that is taken up by a neighboring microbe. This exchange allows some microbes to be non-producers for essential metabolites, instead relying on the biosynthetic activities of...
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Vasvi Chaudhry (University of Tübingen)12/07/2023, 17:00
Plants are associated with a diverse microbiome consisting of bacteria, fungi, and protists that play a crucial role in establishing a stable microbial community that contributes to the health of their host under atypical environmental stresses. Although these microbial communities are co-evolved with plants in either beneficial, commensal, or pathogenic lifestyles, how each member cooperates...
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Aurore Woller12/07/2023, 17:00
Antibiotic resistance is a major threat, motivating the development of procedures to eliminate antibiotic resistant bacteria. Our collaborators (E. Slack’s lab, ETH Zürich) have shown that intestinal antibodies, raised by oral vaccines, enforce the targeted bacterial strain to undergo "enchained growth", forming large clumps, which may be flushed out of the gut faster than free bacteria. They...
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Juan Giral12/07/2023, 17:00
In recent years, great progress has been made towards understanding the properties of species-rich communities with random interactions by leveraging tools from disordered systems. In the simplest models, macroscopic simplicity comes at the expense of a lack of structure in the interaction matrix. We extend previous work to account for communities with structured weak interactions and explore...
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Amanda de Azevedo Lopes (MPI for Evolutionary Biology)12/07/2023, 17:00
Multilevel selection in host-associated microbiomes has important implications for understanding the origin and evolution of these complex associations. To date, we do not have a clear understanding of the different levels that can affect selection on microbial communities. There is evidence that the higher level of selection provided to the microbiome by the host has a significant impact on...
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Kate Williamson (MRC Toxicology Unit)12/07/2023, 17:00
The gut microbiota is now well established as a mediator of human health and disease with a central role in a myriad of host functions beyond digestion, including immune modulation, metabolic regulation and neurological signalling. Compositional changes in these bacterial communities have been causally linked to a multitude of diseases including obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, cancer,...
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medea zanoli (Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies (IMEDEA) , Esporles, Spain)12/07/2023, 17:00
The microbial ecosystem is full of narrow constrictions that microorganisms need to learn to navigate in order to survive. Here, we study a Nature example of a "microorganism billiard": a system composed of a population of microorganisms packed in a closed space, with only a few narrow apertures to escape from. This situation occurs when the marine parasite Parvilucifera sinerae infects and...
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