Research meeting: Principle of Microbial Ecosystems 2023 (14 March)

Research meeting: Principle of Microbial Ecosystems 2023 was held as an open symposium by the Socio-Microbiology (SM) research working group on 14 March 2023 at Tokyo Metropolitan University. The SM research working group aims to understand the principles of microbial ecosystems, which are complex systems formed by interactions of many microorganisms. In this symposium, we invited two outstanding researchers who use mathematical models to understand complex microbial ecosystems. Dr. Mayumi Seto (Nara Women’s University) introduced her research on understanding efficient energy-use strategy at community level from thermodynamics-based microbial network modeling. Dr. Hyun-Seob Song (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) introduced his research on prediction of microbial interactions using the AI modeling by deep learning of spatiotemporal distribution images. In addition, he introduced thermodynamics models based on meta-metabolomic data, i.e., chemical compositions of organic matters obtained by FT-ICR mass spectrometry. Their modeling researches have led to the comprehension of microbial communities based on multi-omics data, indicating that mathematical models are one of the powerful techniques to understand the principles of microbial ecosystems. Lively questions and answers followed their presentations and the research meeting ended with a success. (Masahiro HONJO, Shizuoka University)