We started this term with a nice invitation to present our work on the modelling of the evolution of microbiomes at the Colloquium of the Centre for BioMathematics at Swansea University. In this talk, Gui presented our current work on a stochastic framework for community assembly in which complex microbial communities are assembled during ecological timescales and future generations of inherited microbiomes are seeded from these across evolutionary timescales.

 

These coupling of timescales produces a variety of rich dynamics that allow us to explore the processes by which complex microbiomes associated to multicellular organisms are assembled. The model introduces fitness dependencies of hosts on the performance of microbial communities, as well as the evolution of carrying capacity and vertical transmission. These ingredients are sufficient to produce the complex associations we observe in natural systems such as marine sponges.

The presentation provided interesting grounds for follow up discussions both during the session and afterwards in one-to-one sessions with members of the Mathematics Department, generating new synergies and potential collaborations across research groups!

Special thanks go to Noemi and Valeria for hosting us at the Computational Foundry and providing tea and biscuits! :)