Meet Your Inner Microbial Zoo - Understanding the Human Microbiome

Explore the fascinating world of the human microbiome in this public lecture by Elhanan Borenstein at the Santa Fe Institute. Delve into the complex ecosystem of over 100 trillion microbial cells that populate various sites in the human body and learn about their crucial role in our development, immunity, and nutrition. Discover how advances in sequencing technologies and metagenomics are enabling researchers to characterize the microbiome's composition and its variations in health and disease. Examine the challenges and opportunities in studying this intricate ecosystem, with a focus on the need for predictive system-level models at cellular, ecological, and supra-organismal levels. Gain insights into preliminary attempts and potential computational frameworks for metagenomic-based modeling of the microbiome. Investigate the integration of modeling approaches with multiple meta-omic datasets to achieve a comprehensive, multi-scale, mechanistic understanding of this microbial system. Consider the exciting future clinical applications of microbiome research in this illuminating 76-minute presentation recorded on September 10, 2014.