Kummer Endowed Chair candidate, Dr. Josephine Chandler from the University of Kansas will be the next guest seminar speaker. The title of her presentation is "It's a (microbial) jungle: how bacterial interactions impact complex communities."

Most bacteria are found in complex microbial communities, where they frequently interact with other members of the community. Bacterial interactions play a dramatic role in shaping microbial communities by changing population dynamics and influencing microbial community processes. Prior studies of microbial interactions have been primarily of single-clone populations, which provide a limited view of how interactions might influence more complex communities.

The development of laboratory models or ‘synthetic ecology’ approaches, in combination with genetics and genomics approaches, provide new opportunities to study bacterial interactions. The laboratory models offer a powerful but simplified approach to study multiple-strain and multiple-species communities in a controlled setting. These synthetic communities offer many advantages over direct studies of natural communities, which can present many challenges.

We use laboratory models to study interspecies competition and the evolution of cooperation in bacteria. We are also interested in understanding how bacteria communicate using chemical signals to coordinate competitive and cooperative behaviors. Our work focuses on several members of the Burkholderia genus, the soil bacterium Chromobacterium subtsugae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an opportunistic pathogen and the most common cause of fatality in patients with the genetic disease cystic fibrosis.