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Keynote talk
Competition and warfare in bacteria and the human microbiome
By Prof. Kevin Foster, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Microbial communities contain many evolving and interacting bacteria, which makes them difficult to understand and predict. We combine theory with experimental work to understand what it takes for bacteria to succeed in diverse communities. One way is to actively kill and inhibit competitors and we study the strategies that bacteria use in toxin-mediated warfare. We also use our approaches to understand the human gut microbiome and its key properties including ecological stability and the ability to resist invasion by pathogens (colonization resistance). Our ultimate goal is to both stabilise microbiome communities and remove problem species without the use of antibiotics.