April 29th | Discover how microbial communities shape ecosystems, sustainability, and health. Learn about cutting-edge omics technologies and our innovative tools to explore microbial interactions. Don't miss this opportunity to deepen your understanding of the microbial influence on environmental stability, ecosystem resilience, and disease mechanisms.
Date & Time: April 29, 2025, 16:00–16:45 CEST (UTC+2)
Registration: get your link to the event
Speaker: Alberto Santos, Scientific Director, Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability, Danish Technical University (DTU)
Abstract: Microbial communities serve as the essential foundation of ecosystems, playing pivotal roles in sustainability and health. Furthermore, the changes that ecosystems undergo, whether triggered by climate change or disease, have profound implications for these communities. Yet, their complex interactions and the emergent functions stemming from them remain largely misunderstood. Recent advances in high-throughput omics technologies have facilitated the study of microbiomes from complex environmental samples and these are largely accessible in data repositories such as MGnify. Interpreting environmental microbiomes requires integrating data from multiple studies and technologies, as well as additional knowledge extracted from different data sources. In our group, we are investigating diverse microbiomes by integrating a wide range of publicly available meta-omic datasets and finding potential interactions among microorganisms by inferring microbial association networks (MANs), which help reveal key microbial communities and their possible roles within various environments. Additionally, we develop analytical tools to enable researchers to query, explore, and visualize MANs signatures facilitating a deeper understanding of the microbial influence on environmental stability, ecosystem resilience, and disease mechanisms.
About the speaker: Alberto Santos is a scientific director at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability at the Danish Technical University (DTU), leading the Multi-omics Network Analytics research group (MoNA) and the Informatics Platform. Alberto’s research focuses on data science applied to multidisciplinary topics in biology and aims to address complex challenges in environmental and human health. The main research areas are on Knowledge Graphs (KG) for omics data and the application of Graph Machine Learning to enable the analysis and interpretation of complex datasets to gain new insights that can benefit human and environmental health. Further, his group is providing the research community with standard open resources to build, evaluate, and mine graphs in a reproducible manner.