Internal seminar - Daniel Amor (ENS)

Abstract:

Microbial communities can exhibit both emergent and epistatic properties as a consequence of interactions between multiple species. For example, collective antibiotic resistance can enable bacterial species to survive antibiotic treatments that would be lethal for those species in isolation. While the response to antibiotics and other perturbations has been extensively studied in single-species cultures, the responses that can emerge in community context remain largely understudied. First in this talk, I will present our recent work addressing different kinds of dynamics and response to perturbations for experimental microbial communities. In particular, I will present i) how an interplay between antibiotic susceptibility and species growth rates can drive the response of a simple community to antibiotic exposure, and ii) different phases of dynamics experimental communities can exhibit as their complexity increases. Then, I will discuss some research directions that I envisage for the study of emergent properties of community functions.