Master/Semester Project: Identifying metabolic interactions in a microbial consortium

*** No longer accepting applications ***

Understanding the interactions between microorganisms in communities is important, but challenging. The frequently used transcriptomics data provide only indirect information on the major type of these interactions: metabolite exchange. This project investigates a consortium of 4 mammalian colon bacteria. These bacteria were modified so they can be separated magnetically after incubation, which allows to study their metabolome as it was in the community. This semester or master project will grow the consortium in batch cultures to study how different media influence the consortium dynamics. The media will be designed to resemble as much as possible the in vivo conditions in the mammalian gut. In this project, you will learn bacterial cultivation, qPCR, LC-MS data acquisition, and computational analysis.

Please contact Mario Correia (mpovoa at ethz.ch) for more information