OCEANUS SEMINAR SERIES | Matti Gralka | 9 NOV | 11:30

 

Title: Fundamental metabolic strategies of heterotrophic bacteria

 

The enormous diversity of heterotrophic bacteria in the environment begs the question to what degree their metabolic niches can be understood in terms of a small number of simplified functional categories. Here, we show that, despite high variability at all levels of taxonomy, the metabolic niches of heterotrophic bacteria can be summarized along a single axis, representing the preference for either glycolytic (sugars) or gluconeogenic (amino and organic acids) carbon sources. This preference is encoded in the abundance of metabolic pathways and associated with genomic GC content. Thus, our work reveals that bacterial genomes are structured by a fundamental constraint on microbial evolution rooted in metabolism.

 

About: Matti Gralka is fascinated by microbial communities and the principles that guide their assembly and function. To discover these principles, he combines high-throughput characterization and synthetic community assembly experiments in marine bacteria with environmental 'omics data and mathematical models of communities. In September 2022, he moved to the Amsterdam Institute for Life and Environment (A-LIFE) at the VU Amsterdam as an Assistant Professor, after a postdoc in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at MIT.

 

The seminar will take place online through this LINK.

 

If you are a CIIMAR member you can also access last seminars recordings through the LINK.