Online Seminar Series – 30 Sep 2021
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SymbNET Online Seminar Series
Monthly seminars on host-microbe symbiosis, genomics, and metabolomics, with two talks from SymbNET researchers.
The seminars are open and free to all, but registration is required.
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15:00 WEST / 16:00 CEST
Affiliation: Evolutionary Ecology of Microbial Communities, University of Lausanne (UNIL), Switzerland
Title: Eco-evolutionary dynamics in a small bacterial community
Abstract: Microbial communities in soil or the mammalian gut typically contains tens to hundreds of microbial species. These ecosystems are constantly changing, as the community first assembles and as species adapt to each other and to their environment. Because studying such dynamics in a natural system is extremely challenging, in my lab we adress this question using small bacterial communities as model systems. I will first talk about a study where we show how the interactions between four bacterial species depend on their environment: the harsher the environment, the more likely it is for species to interact positively. We then ask how these interactions evolve over time, and find that interactions do not become competitive, but some positive interactions are lost depending on the ability of the species to survive alone. These results provide an intuition on how microbial species in more natural environments may adapt to one another over evolutionary time-scales.
15:00 WEST / 16:00 CEST
Affiliation: Cell Biology of Viral Infection Lab, FCG-IGC, Portugal
Title: New paradigms in influenza A virus research
Abstract: Viruses thrive on specific hosts where they may cause disease and thus are highly relevant for ecosystems, health and agriculture. Due to the small size of their genomes, they are highly dependent and adapted to the host they infect. Many viral life cycles, including influenza A virus (IAV), form specialized compartments which promote immune evasion, and progeny virion production. My laboratory showed that upon IAV infection, specialized compartments called viral inclusions are formed in the cytosol of infected cells. These are enriched in progeny RNA and constitute sites to assemble IAV genomic complex – that is composed of 8 (and no more than 8) different RNA segments. We showed that these inclusions are membraneless and adopt the hallmarks of classical biomolecular condensates. In this seminar, I will show that IAV liquid inclusions display liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) traits whose formation is regulated by concentration and maintained by weak interactions between the components in inclusions. In addition, we provide evidence for the need to maintain IAV inclusions fluid and show that phase transitions are possible and reduce viral production.
SymbNET Seminars