Professor Samraat Pawar - Imperial College London

Summary:  Bacteria are the second-most abundant organisms on Earth and play a dominant role in decomposing organic matter, recycling nutrients, and releasing greenhouse gases. Therefore, predicting (and engineering) the assembly, stability, and functioning of bacterial communities (or microbiomes) is necessary for predicting how Earth's biogeochemical cycles will change in an increasingly unpredictable global climate. However, predicting the dynamics of bacterial communities, which typically contain complex networks of hundreds of interacting taxa ("strains") and trillions of cells, is one of the greatest contemporary challenges in biology. This challenge is amplified by the fact that, in the real world, temperature, nutrients, and chemical conditions (e.g., through pollution) are constantly fluctuating. Temperature is particularly important because of its universal thermodynamic effects on cellular physiology and associated metabolic rates (functional traits), from resource uptake and processing, to allocation and growth. I will present our progress towards the "Digital Microbiome": an empirically-validated toolkit for predicting the effects of environmental fluctuations on the dynamics of bacterial community assembly, stability, and functioning.

Personal Bio: Prof. Pawar studies how individual-level metabolism scales up through species (population) interactions to community- and ecosystem-level dynamics. See https://mhasoba.pythonanywhere.com/pawarlab for a more detail.