4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Auditorium between Bldg. 4&5, Level 0, Room 0215
Bottom-up Assembly of Microbial Communities: Modeling, Analysis and Engineering
Abstract:
Microbes are of fundamental importance to human health, environment and agriculture. To exploit their potential for various purposes, a fundamental challenge is to decipher the basic rules of community organization that is heterogeneous in space and time. My lab aims to address the challenge using a bottom-up approach that combines biophysical modeling with experimental synthetic biology. Recently, we developed a computational platform that enables individual-based simulation of microbial communities across multiple scales. We also explored how the modes of cellular social interaction and the spatial scale of interaction contribute to microbial assemblages using the platform, both of which were subsequently determined using experimental ecosystems. Using engineered cellular interactions, we further demonstrated the utility of synthetic microbial consortia for metabolic engineering applications. Our studies provide insights into the organization of complex microbial communities and illustrate the potential of synthetic communities for practical goals.
Speaker’s bio:
Professor Ting Lu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He received B.S. in Physics from Zhejiang University in 2002 and Ph.D. in Biophysics from UC-San Diego in 2007. Prior to joining UIUC in 2011, Dr. Lu was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton, MIT, and Wyss Institute at Harvard. Dr. Lu’s research focuses on the analysis, construction and utilization of bacterial gene regulatory networks for cellular functionality programming. He has received several awards for his research, including ONR Young Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award, NARSAD Young Investigator Award, and Young Innovator of Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering.