Home Department: Engineering
Mentor: Benjamin Good (Applied Physics)

"Building Genome-Scale Metabolic Models of Complex Microbial Communities"

The gut microbiome plays a crucial role in human health. Much remains unknown about how the abundance of different strains of bacteria changes over time, and what happens when two diverse communities of bacteria are mixed, as in a fecal microbiome transplant. This project seeks to address this gap in fundamental knowledge by developing novel simulations of microbial communities. The simulations will incorporate genome-scale metabolic models of individual strains as well as resource competition between strains to make precise quantitative predictions of strain abundances and resource consumption over time. The results will be compared with analytical theory and experimental results.