Social Networks at Microscale

SPRING 2017 RESEARCH INCUBATION AWARDEES 

PI: Kirill Korolev, Physics, CAS
Co-PIs: Daniel Segre, Biology, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Engineering (CAS & ENG)

The project aims to develop a computational tool that can use microbial genomes to predict microbial interactions and ultimately ecosystem dynamics. Beyond prediction, this computational tool will be used to develop design principles for artificial communities and infer microbial interactions in medical and environmental microbiomes. The latter constitutes a major challenge faced by the microbiome research today as interactions are inferred from patterns of co-occurrence in cross-sectional data or temporal correlations in longitudinal data. The computational tool will constrain interaction types using genome-scale metabolic models and remove network motifs inconsistent with the need to co-localize in space. As a result, it will considerably improve the power of sequencing surveys to identify interactions.

This work is funded by a Hariri Research Award made in January, 2017.