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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20261020T233852Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20170210T172210Z
DTSTART:20170214T154500Z
DTEND:20170214T164500Z
UID:event1705@bu.edu
URL:http://physics.bu.edu/internal/events/show/1705
SUMMARY:Network Topology and Community Function in Spatial Microbial Commun
	ities
DESCRIPTION:Featuring Rajita Menon\n\nPart of the Departmental Seminars.\n\
	nDissertation Committee:  Kirill Korolev\, Pankaj Mehta\, Shyam Erramilli\,
	 Kevin Black and Rama Bansil\n\nAbstract:\nMulti-species microbial communit
	ies perform tasks ranging from the production of biofuels and the release o
	f powerful greenhouse gases to the digestion of food inside our gut. Microb
	iota in the human body contribute to many dimensions of host phenotype\, in
	cluding diseases such as obesity\, diabetes and colitis. In this talk\, I d
	emonstrate that microbial inter-dependencies can produce a large number of 
	spurious associations in statistical studies linking specific taxa to the i
	ncidence of disease. Using techniques from statistical physics\, I propose 
	a method to control for microbial interactions (Direct Association Analysis
	 or DAA) which corrects the skew towards highly significant associations in
	 the largest dataset on inflammatory bowel disease. In the second part of t
	he talk\, I explore the relationship between underlying interaction topolog
	y and community function in spatial microbial communities. Cooperation betw
	een two species is exceedingly stable\, while mutualism requiring 3 or more
	 species collapses via a non-equilibrium phase transition. Further\, adding
	 pairwise cyclic or reciprocal interactions can stabilize 3-species mutuali
	sm. These results suggest concrete strategies to engineer robust microbial 
	consortia and detect cooperative interactions from the patterns of species 
	distribution in space.
LOCATION:SCI 328\, 590 Commonwealth Avenue\, 02215
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CLASS:PUBLIC
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