Speaker：Dr. Marnix H. Medema, Professor

Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Title：“Deciphering the chemical language of the microbiome using computational genomics”

Time：Oct 17th 2022,15: 00 -16:00pm [Beijing]

Tencent Meeting：https://meeting.tencent.com/dw/BF79XPzqK1aC

Abstract:

An important challenge in microbiome science is to obtain an understanding of the mechanistic basis for many microbe-associated phenotypes. Microbial specialized metabolites are important mediators of molecular interactions between microbes as well as with the host, and in a way constitute the ‘chemical language’ of the microbiome. Hence, they are of great importance from both ecological and clinical perspectives. A range of computational methods have been developed to identify these molecules and the metabolic gene clusters that encode their production, and to assess their biological activities. Here, I will highlight recent work performed in my research group on developing and applying these approaches to accelerate natural product discovery, as well as to study the roles of these pathways in microbe-microbe and host-microbe interactions in microbiomes.