PreMiEr Spring 2024 Seminar Series – Dr. Karthik Anantharaman

Please join the NSF Engineering Research Center for Precision Microbiome Engineering (PreMiEr) and host institution The University of North Carolina at Charlotte for a talk from Dr. Karthik Anantharaman of the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

(Re)defining the roles of phage in microbiomes

Viruses that infect microbes (typically referred to as bacteriophages, or phages) are amongst the most abundant biological entities in all ecosystems. By infecting and lysing microbial populations, phages can affect community composition and function which can directly impact ecosystems, biogeochemistry, and human health and disease. Increasing use of sequencing approaches such as metagenomics has allowed the generation of massive quantities of ‘viral dark matter’ from microbiomes, which refers to viruses, viral genomes, and proteins which are poorly characterized. In this talk, I will present novel techniques developed in our laboratory including the use of machine and deep learning approaches to study phage ecology in microbiomes. Our approaches allow for the study of phage at multiple resolutions and enable prediction of phage-microbe metabolic interactions at the scale of entire communities in human and environmental systems. Overall, these approaches have diverse applications ranging from engineering viruses, microbiomes, and ecosystems, to phage therapy.

Open to the public, but registration required for non-PreMiEr members.

Non-PreMiEr members can register for the seminar series through this link.