Guest seminar: Dr Nassos Typas "Emergent behaviours during drug treatment of microbial communities"

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. Nassos Typas from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg.

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.

The lecturer 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.

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Nassos Typas. Massimo Del Prete/EMBL

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. Further information can be found on our homepage.