Microbiome connectivity and adapting to climate change

Betsy Foxman, PhD (Hunein F. and Hilda Maassab Endowed Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Center for Molecular and Clinical Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases (MAC-EPID),  Co-Director of the Integrated Training program in Microbial Systems (ITiMS))

Christopher Lawson, PhD

Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry, University of Toronto

Introduced by student Renisha Karki.

Prof. Lawson and his team are interested in the biomanufacturing of sustainable chemicals from underutilized “waste” streams using engineered microbial communities (microbiomes). They integrate approaches from microbial ecology, automation, and metabolic engineering to develop synthetic microbial communities for waste-to-chemical conversion and to elucidate basic principles governing microbiome function.

Ellen Decaestecker, PhD

Full Professor of Biology, KU Leuven, Belgium

Introduced by student Alex Song.

Professor Decaestecker's research group, hosted at the KU Leuven Interdisciplinary Research Facility Life Sciences, investigates host-microbiome interactions in different model systems from invertebrates (water fleas, freshwater snails and spider mites) up to (marine) mammals and primates (lemurs and humans). In in vivo experimental set-ups with axenic models and through molecular research (amplicon sequencing and metagenomics), they investigate:

- The role of environmental change in disease emergence within a One Health perspective. We study host-pathogen interactions in natural ecosystems to gain insight into the processes that control the dynamics of these antagonistic interactions, which is especially relevant under climate change and changing habitats. We also reconstruct co-evolutionary dynamics over long time periods via sediment cores and theoretical models 

- The role of microbiomes and epigenetics in modified phenotypes. Phenotypes are beside the host genome largely determined by the microbiome and the epigenome. We study the interaction of these effects in host resistance and tolerance to stressors (pathogens, predators, toxic cyanobacteria and hypoxia) over larger landscapes (geographic mosaics).

- Evolutionary applications of molecular and microbiome research, more in particular we link phylogenetic associations through reconstructions of the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA to unravel genetic signals in the human microbiome.

Doug Woodhams, PhD

Professor of Biology, University of Massachusetts Boston

Introduced by student Riley Manuel.

Dr. Doug Woodhams is a disease ecologist working to understand the microbial contribution to immunity and the applications of altering microbiota for conservation and human health. Goals of the Woodhams lab are to effectively manage amphibian chytridiomycosis in a changing environment, to understand mechanisms of resilience to disease at the scales of individual, population and landscape, and to develop an amphibian model system for mucosal immunity using vaccination and microbiome manipulation.