MATHEMATICAL MODELING OF THE ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION OF HOST-ASSOCIATED MICROBIOTA

Most multicellular organisms do not exist in isolation but rather cohabit with a multitude of microbes forming their microbiota. In a wide variety of organisms, microbiota diversity is essential to the host’s health. Today, one of the major challenges in biomedical research is to achieve the manipulation of the microbiota for therapeutic purposes. While heuristic approaches are clinically tested, a quantitative understanding of the dynamical processes involved is lacking. Our group’s research focuses on understanding the eco-evolutionary dynamics governing the composition of the gut microbiota. We aim to address a wide range of questions:

How do hosts and microbes co-evolve?
How is the microbiota diversity maintained in the host?
What are the control mechanisms that the host can exert on its microbiota at minimal costs?
How can within-host microbial dynamics impact an infectious spread at the scale of the host population?
Can microbiota modeling provide valuable insights for clinical applications or public health decision-makers?
To study these questions, we use mathematical modeling, combining analytical and numerical techniques with stochastic simulations and collaborating and frequently exchanging with experimentalists.