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University of Essex homepage Events The human gut microbiome explored at single nucleotide resolution
Event

The human gut microbiome explored at single nucleotide resolution

  • Thu 23 Mar 23

    13:00 - 14:00

  • Colchester Campus

    STEM 3.1

  • Event speaker

    Falk Hildebrand

  • Event type

    Lectures, talks and seminars

  • Event organiser

    Life Sciences, School of

  • Contact details

    Professor Leonard Schalkwyk

The gut microbiome is essential to the wellbeing and health of its human host, yet most studies can only resolve the gut microbial community at genus or species level.

Yet we do know that two bacterial strains of the same species can differ by more than half their genome. Furthermore, in clinically relevant microbes, pathogenicity is often a trait encoded at the strain - not species - level. Therefore, Falk Hildebrand's group develops the technologies to track bacterial strain in metagenomic time series, and to investigate evolutionary pressures.

Falk will present some of studies, where they can show the immense persistence of gut bacteria in healthy human cohorts. A large fraction of microbial species (but not all!) are frequently exchanged among family members, reflected in the selective pressures on their genes.

Investigating microbiomes in patients, strain resolved metagenomics becomes even more important, as many difference between healthy and diseased microbiomes can only be detected using strain resolved metagenomics.

Speaker

For the past 15 years Falk Hildebrand has researched bacterial genomes, specialising on developing metagenomics software and numerical ecology to describe microbial ecosystems.

In his career he had the opportunity to work with some of the most prominent figures in the gut metagenomics field, receiving his PhD in the lab of Prof Jeroen Raes (U Louvain, Belgium), afterwards researching bacterial evolution with Prof Peer Bork (EMBL, Germany), funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie scholarship. Much of this research was linked with the METAHIT consortium (ERC FP7 programme) that pioneered metagenomic bioinformatics with demonstrating metagenomic assemblies, genome reconstructions and strain resolved metagenomics.

In 2019 Falk joined the Quadram Institute and Earlham Institute in Norwich, UK. His group develops algorithms for strain resolved metagenomics, taking advantage of novel developments in sequencing technologies and funded by an ERC Starter Grant. They use a combination of dry- & wetlab technologies to track bacterial strains, decipher microbial adaptation and to ultimately understand how the human gut microbiome is implied in health and disease.

How to attend

This seminar is being held in person in STEM 3.1 (STEM Centre on Square 1, Colchester campus). You can also watch via Zoom (meeting ID: 916 2270 2239)

If you have any queries about this seminar please email Professor Leonard Schalkwyk (lschal@essex.ac.uk).

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