Guest seminar: "Emergent behaviours during drug treatment of microbial communities" with Dr. Athanasios Typas.

On Friday, October 4, at 10.15 a.m., a guest seminar on "Emergent behaviours during drug treatment of microbial communities" will take place in the Institute of Genomics at the University of Tartu (Riia 23b, room 105) by Dr. Athanasios Typas from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg.

Nassos is a trained biochemist, molecular microbiologist, and systems biologist. He did his undergraduate studies in Chemistry/Biochemistry at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, his PhD at the Free University of Berlin with Regine Hengge and his postdoctoral research at the University of California at San Francisco with Carol Gross. Since 2011, he has been running his own group at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) at Heidelberg, and since 2020, he has been a Senior Scientist. His lab develops systems-based quantitative approaches and combines it with mechanistic work to study how bacteria interact with the environment, the host and with each other. He will be visiting the Institute of Genomics as the opponent for Kertu Liis Krigul's PhD defence.

Description of the guest seminar:
Pharmaceuticals both impact many members of the human gut microbiota, and in turn, their bioavailability is modified by gut microbes. Yet little is known about how these drug-microbe interactions manifest in complex community settings and how they impact community composition. By profiling a large number of drugs in both complex synthetic communities and individually on each community member, they established that although, in most cases, individual species behave the same in isolation and in the community setting, communal traits emerge for about a quarter of all cases. He will present the nature of these communal behaviours, their relation with the severity of the drug perturbation, and their underlying mechanisms. Finally ways to specifically mitigate the adverse effects of drugs in key members of these microbial communities will be discussed.

Time: Oct 4, 2024 10:15 AM Helsinki
Join Zoom Meeting: https://ut-ee.zoom.us/j/96074119582?pwd=pKHxHC8roif6vIb8Xf5ykSPhNZj3IP.1
Meeting ID: 960 7411 9582
Passcode: 276963