We had a great talk and discussion within our RPA community during the last two series of Microbiome Friday Seminars.
A seminar was held on 29 November 2024, where Jianbo Zhang shared his research on modeling host-microbiome interactions using the GuMI model. He presented that GuMI can co-culture multiple types of intestinal cells and gut bacteria under a physiologically relevant environment. Fruitful discussions followed the talk, arising from audience questions surrounding the topics of culturing cells derived from humans at different ages and different parts of the gut, technicalities in running the model, and how much the human social aspect can be modeled in the study. This seminar was the last in the 2024 series, and we thank Jianbo for sharing his research!
To start the year on a good note, we organized a seminar on 10 January 2025. David Barnett and Martha Endika were invited to share their research conducted during their PhD projects on the effect of antibiotics and prebiotics on developing infant gut microbiota.
In his talk, David presented the R package he developed called microViz, which is a user-friendly package for visualizing and analyzing microbiome data. Many researchers have benefited from this package and the tutorials that can be found in the microViz documentation (https://david-barnett.github.io/microViz/). David also shared a study exploring the role of gut microbiota in infants with gastrointestinal symptoms, including infantile colic. Discussions following his talk included topics such as maternal stress and the association between specific microbial groups and colic.
For the second talk, Martha shared her research using the TIM-2 colon model to assess the influence of non-digestible carbohydrates (NDCs) on mitigating the adverse effects of antibiotics on infant gut microbiota. In her talk, she observed that changes in microbiota composition often occurred after antibiotic treatment, while microbial metabolite production was more resilient to changes. A specific type of NDC might help promote the recovery of gut microbes after antibiotic treatment. Discussions following her talk included topics such as modeling the influx of microbes, the use of probiotics, and the antimicrobial resistance profile of the community.
Thank you to all the speakers and participants for the wonderful discussions during the past series of Microbiome Friday Seminars!