Unlocking the functional diversity of gut microbiomes

Conference overview

The gut microbiome has well-established links to human health and disease. The complex and highly personalized communities that live in our gut encode 100x more genes than our genome, and have far-reaching effects beyond the gut, from our immune system to our brain. In contrast to our genome, our microbiome is actionable, offering unprecedented opportunities for interventions. Yet progress in this direction has been slow, as we still lack the basic molecular and ecological understanding of those complex microbial communities.

In the past two decades, data-driven research has revealed key characteristics of the human gut microbiome e.g. its stability, diversity and highly personalized composition. Yet, our current view on its functional capacities and its interplay with the host remains mostly descriptive. As the field is now striving for causality and mechanistic insights towards a deeper understanding of the microbiome-human health links, these efforts are hindered by the lack of model gut microorganisms and foundational functional knowledge. Our current knowledge of bacterial gene functions, pathways and cellular architecture stems from very few model bacteria, which fail to capture the phylogenetic and genetic diversity of the gut microbiota. As a consequence, the vast majority of genes in the gut microbiome remain “dark matter” with respect to function, that is of elusive or completely unknown function.

This conference aims at presenting the first efforts to systematically tackle this vast dark genetic matter in the human gut microbiome. It also aims at fostering a discussion and charting a framework on how to engage in this direction in a systematic and collaborative manner in the future. What tools and approaches are needed? What knowledge will propel microbiome research and help to dissect correlative from causal links, reveal underlying molecular mechanisms and ultimately, to progress to health applications? A particular focus will be on how to select and establish new model species for the human gut microbiome that will propel functional understanding and microbiome engineering. This has be the core focus of the EMBL Microbial Ecosystems Transversal Theme in the past few years, and lessons and results will be presented.

Session topics

Data-driven functional discovery

Genetic tools for mapping gene function and interactions

Multi-omics for mapping gene function and cellular organization

Visualizing functional units and protein machines

Gene function in its ecological context (communities, host, phages)

Looking outward and forward – links to other microbiomes

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Scientific Organisers

Kiran Patil

University of Cambridge

Lisa Maier

University of Tübingen

Germany

Nassos Typas

EMBL Heidelberg

Germany

Robert Finn

EMBL-EBI

Unlocking the functional diversity of gut microbiomes

Conference overview

Session topics