(3q) Unlocking the Functional Potential of Microbial Communities

Natural microbial ecosystems are often complex mixtures of hundreds or thousands of species, making it difficult to reduce such systems into its functional components and processes.  Understanding how these communities function is further complicated by how the activity of each individual species interacts with its local environment, the space it inhabits, and its neighbors.  Yet it is these interactions within the community that are essential for many of the important functions of microbial systems, including the degradation of environmental wastes, nitrogen cycling in the soil, and the digestion of complex metabolites in the gut.  Interactions within communities also regulate community composition and help to regulate the flux of nutrients through networks of biochemical pathways.  The ability to identify the sets of microorganisms essential to function and to quantify how their interactions regulate activity could enable both control over microbial community function and the ability to design communities to perform specific functions. 

In order to discover and study microbial communities, we first must develop new methods of studying microbes at the community level.  This poster will highlight my work thus far in this direction, including how the activity of microbial communities is dependent upon spatial structure and my work in modeling and experimentally validating quantitative predictions of microbial activity.  The poster will also introduce future research directions that will answer key questions in this area including:  How does community composition influences activity?  Can the community composition and function be controlled by adjusting chemical and biological parameters of the environment?  What are the key mechanisms that regulate interactions within the community?