Thursday Seminar: Rob Knight

Title: “Microbiome individuality and microbiome twins” Abstract: There is an increasing appreciation that microbiomes contribute substantially to animal model and human phenotypes ranging from weight to mood. This raises the question of whether microbiomes should be treated as classes (i.e. do people who have the same microbiome in some sense behave the same), or as individuals (spatiotemporally localized cohesive and continuous entities, following Hull), or in some hybrid fashion. In this talk I discuss recent results concerning variation in the human microbiome, our current and future ability to change our microbiomes to resemble those of another person, and the concept of digital twins that can capture essential features of an individual’s microbiome for counterfactual scenarios, such as response to a range of possible future treatments.