Seminar by Lena Takayasu

Spatial and dynamical properties of human microbiome
Lena Takayasu
Assistant professor, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo
Visiting researcher in Center for IMS, RIKEN

Abstract :
The microbiome residing in one human body is composed of trillions of bacteria consisted of hundreds of bacterial species, and useful and harmful aspects of some bacterial species have been studied intensively. Recent progress of sequencing techniques enabled us to analyze the comprehensive community structure of human microbiomes with large quantity of data which is so-called metagenomic analysis. Using metagenomic analysis, I observed daily dynamics of microbiome population abundance and proposed a 3-dimensional lattice model for reproducing the observed prevalent fat-tailed abundance distribution of gut microbiomes based on the bacterial spatial imaging technique on the epithelial surface of mice gut. I will also briefly review the microbiome studies until very recent, and will mention the bias caused by DNA extracting method or taxonomic assignment, which can be problematic when we use public microbiome data. Finally, I will share some of our latest results; i) the gut microbiomes abundance fluctuation of genetically identical mice through whole life, ii) the spatial distribution of microbes in mammal digestive tracts, and iii) stimulus-response traits against food and antibiotic treatments.