Research meeting: Principles of Microbial Ecosystems 2019

Research meeting: Principles of Microbial Ecosystems 2019
– how interspecies interactions shape community assembly –

How can we find principles of microbial ecosystems? Microbial ecologists have long been struggling to understand “function”, “stability”, and “plasticity” of microbial communities. However, we still have a long way to find the principles since a huge number of species coexist and interact with each other to form a complex network relationship. In order to understand the microbial ecosystems and to predict and regulate ecosystem dynamics, we should completely characterize the interactions as well as individual species. Pairwise interactions have been known to be commensal and mutualistic as positive ones and competitive and predatory as negative ones, but the interspecies interactions should be modulated by abiotic and biotic factors to shape community assembly. Multi-omics approaches, comprehensive metabolic flux analyses, artificial model microbial consortia, mathematical modelling, and their combinations would lead us to develop effective approaches to the goal. We hope this meeting is a good chance to exchange opinions about studies on “principles of microbial ecosystems”.

Date: 10 August (Sat)
Venue: Tokyo Metropolitan University, Minami-Osawa campus (Building 12, Room 201)

10:30- Haruta, Shin (Tokyo Metropolitan Univ.)
Warm-up remarks “microbial interspecies network -an end goal or a beginning step-”
(Introduction of advanced metabolomic analyses tools by a special speaker:TBA)
11:30- [lunch break]
13:00- Kato, Hiromi (Tohoku Univ.)
Soil complex system: how does it maintain thousands of species?
13:45- Lindemann, S. R. (Purdue Univ.)
Complex substrates and microbial diversity: how carbohydrate structure governs microbiome structure and function
14:30-
[break]
14:45- Futamata, Hiroyuki (Shizuoka Univ.)
A Mechanism of Bacterial Coexistence: how is a metabolic network formed?
15:30- Soma, Yuki (Kyushu Univ.)
Design of microbial metabolism for the control of collective microbial behavior
16:15- [break]
16:30- Momeni, Babak (Boston College)
Modeling chemical-mediated interactions: impact on microbial community assembly and colonization resistance
17:15- [free discussion]

Contact: Shin Haruta (Tokyo Metropolitan University)