Visualization of the Microbiome Interactome: The Microscopic Talk Between Microbes and Their Host

TOPICAL COLLECTIONS

Guest Editors

Naama Geva-Zatorsky

Technion Institute of Technology, Israel

Naama Geva-Zatorsky is an Assistant Professor at the Technion Institute of Technology and The Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. She completed her PhD with honors in Systems-Biology at the Weizmann Institute, in Prof. Uri Alon’s lab, and received the JFK, Teva, and Barenholz awards. Her postdoctoral studies were at Harvard Medical School, in the lab of Prof. Dennis Kasper, for which she received the Human Frontiers and EMBO fellowships, as well as the UNESCO-L’Oreal awards (national and international). During her postdoc, in addition to characterizing the host response to roughly 60 different gut bacteria, from across phyla, she also applied metabolic labeling to enable, for the first time, real time visualization of anaerobic gut microbes, in association with the host. With the help of her team, her lab is applying Systems-Biology thinking strategies with Microbiology, Immunology, and Bacteriophage biology to study the mechanistic and functional interactions of the gut microbiota with mammalian host physiology in health and disease, and under varying conditions. They are also developing tools to study microbe-host interactions in a dynamic manner and in natural environments. Geva-Zatorsky recently received the Johnson & Johnson WiSTEM2D award, the CIFAR-Azrieli Global Scholar award of the Humans & Microbiome Program, the Alon and Horev fellowships, and the Human Frontiers career development award.

Neerupma Bhardwaj

Technion Institute of Technology, Israel

Dr. Neerupma Bhardwaj is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Prof. Naama Geva-Zatorsky at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Israel, where she is studying microbe-microbe and microbe-host interactions. She is focusing on decoding the crosstalk between gut bacteria and the host by studying the microbial social interactions in a synthetic gut microbial community and by developing methods to trace microbial interactions with host immune cells in real-time. She received her PhD in Antimicrobial resistance and Drug discovery from the Indian Institute of Science, in India. During her PhD, she studied stress associated pathways in bacteria and designed a drug to combat these pathways. She investigated host-pathogen cross-talks, quorum sensing, biofilm formation, and antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

Collection Overview

Understanding the structural and functional role of the microbiome in human physiology has become crucial for many aspects of human health. Many studies link the microbiome to disease states. Most studies are based on high throughput-omics data interpretation of fecal content. Studying host-microbiota interactions at the mechanistic level, microscopic examinations at the micron-scale, and preferably in their natural niches, is required. Microbes interact with their microbial neighbors and with their host in both direct and indirect manners – e.g. by exchanging secreted molecules and by physical contact. In both cases, their spatial localization and organization plays an important role. To decipher the mechanistic details of these interactions and their functional properties, visualization is key. Genetic engineering approaches for tracking the microbial commensals are limited, primarily since, in most cases, their natural environment is anaerobic. However, in recent years, efforts have been made to overcome this hurdle by combining multiple labeling approaches for studying the microbial communities and the microbes along the gastrointestinal tract in animal models. In this collection, we will include the various experimental strategies that exist to study and visualize microbe-microbe and microbe-host interactions either in vitro or in their natural niche.