Microbial Range Expansion and the Spread of Antibiotic Resistance

Description

Abstract
Every surface-attached microbial community must undergo range expansion at some point in its existence. Range expansion refers to the movement of cells into previously unoccupied space. The range expansion process has at least two important outcomes. First, different populations (species, strains, etc.) begin to arrange themselves non-randomly across space and form spatial patterns, which I refer to as spatial self-organization. Second, biodiversity is lost at the expansion frontier as a consequence of competition and drift. Both of these outcomes can have important effects on community-level properties and on the evolutionary and ecological processes acting on communities. In this talk, I will first present mechanisms and processes that can counteract the purifying effects of competition and drift at the expansion frontier, and thus slow the loss of biodiversity. I will next discuss the consequences on an important community-level process; the horizontal spread and proliferation of antibiotic resistance. Finally, I will discuss how our findings are potentially generalizable to nearly any surface-attached microbial community, including those important for environmental sustainability, biotechnology, and human health and disease.

Biography
Dave Johnson is a Senior Scientist and leader of the Microbial Community Assembly group in the Department of Environmental Microbiology at Eawag. He received his MS from the University of Michigan and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, both in Environmental Engineering. He then became a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne and subsequently a junior group leader at ETH Zürich. His main interests are on the causes and consequences of microbial spatial self-organization. He serves on the editorial boards for The ISME Journal and Current Opinion in Biotechnology, and serves on the commissions of the Swiss Society for Microbiology and the European Federation of Biotechnology. In his free time, he enjoys trying to prevent his two sons and his Spanish Greyhound from destroying his apartment.

Register for Zoom link: https://tinyurl.com/k5axpvxc