Microbial Community Dynamics in Time and Space
Microbes are by far the most dominant forms of life on earth. In every imaginable habitat, they form complex communities that carry out diverse functions. Microbial communities drive the geochemical cycling of diverse chemicals and through these activities shape the earth’s climate and environment. They are also intimately tied to human physiology and health. Members of each microbial community may compete for resources, collaborate to process the resources or to cope with stress. They communicate with each other by producing and responding to signaling molecules. They innovate by exchanging genetic materials. These interactions raise fundamental questions regarding the evolutionary and ecological forces that shape microbial consortia. Our lab has adopted a combination of quantitative biology and synthetic biology to explore these questions. We engineer gene circuits to program dynamics of one or more bacterial populations and use them to examine questions in cellular signal processing, evolution, ecology, and development. Analysis of these systems has provided insights into bacterial tolerance to antibiotics, developmental pattern formation, and scaling, as well as strategies to use bacteria for the living fabrication of functional materials by exploiting programmed self-organization.
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About the Speaker
Lingchong You is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. The You lab (youlab.bio) uses a combination of mathematical modeling, machine learning, and quantitative experiments to elucidate principles underlying the dynamics of microbial communities for applications in computation, engineering, and medicine. Dr. You is a David and Lucile Packard Fellow (2006), a Dupont Young Professor(2008), an NSF Career Awardee (2010), and a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biomedical Engineering (2019). He currently serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including Molecular Systems Biology, PLoS Computational Biology, Quantitative Biology, and ACS Synthetic Biology.
