DiSCourse Seminar with Luis Miguel Rodríguez-Rojas
02 July 2021, 12:00 (CEST), online
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How can you live together? Using environmental genomics to understand how microbes form communities
Microbial communities can form in most known surfaces and fluids on Earth, colonizing every corner of the planet known to humans (including ourselves). Remarkably, these communities typically comprise a large diversity of organisms, but we still understand very little about how different species coexist in diverse communities in different environments, a problem known as community assembly. During the past two decades, advances on highthroughput DNA sequencing have unlocked a treasure trove of data, that combined with statistical and computational advances in bioinformatics permit now the exploration of these questions using environmental genomics. Here, I will present a series of results demonstrating different methods in genomics and metagenomics to illuminate the roles of intrinsic species traits, the interactions between them and with the environment, and migrations into the processes of community assembly and coexistence. In particular, I will focus on the effects of disturbances on microbial communities and the effects of specialization, which will be illustrated through the impact on the beach sand microbial communities of the catastrophic April 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Luis Miguel Rodríguez-Rojas, University of Innsbruck, Department of Microbiology and DiSC