Tuesday, 02. December 2025, 16.15 p.m.
Hörsaal Am Planetarium 1

Are microbial communities predictable?

Prof. Dr. Oliver Ebenhöh
(Institut für Quantitative und Theoretische Biologie, Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf)

Microbial communities play central functional roles in virtually every ecosystem on Earth. The symbiosis with microbes is essential for animals and plants, e.g. to obtain nutrients and break down complex biopolymers.

Barcoding sequencing is a fast and cost-effective method to determine which microbial species are present in any given sample. Over the past decades, a vast amount of microbial community data for the most diverse environments has become available. These data show that microbial communities are incredibly complex, containing hundreds or even thousands of amplicon sequence variants (ASVs), and very dynamic in their composition. This raises the question if, and if yes how, the dynamics of microbial communities can actually be modelled with reasonable accuracy and whether their future dynamics can be predicted, given the environmental conditions.

In my presentation, I will discuss a number of examples of dynamic microbial communities and illustrate our theoretical approaches to analyse these data. Our approaches differ in methodology, reflecting the specific scientific question asked, ranging from classical dynamic models based on differential equations to innovative data analysis techniques. Preliminary conclusions suggest detailed models including hundreds of species may be impossible to parametrise and too parameter sensitive to have predictive power, but may be useful for stochastic approaches to answer fundamental questions regarding stability, robustness and richness of ecosystems. Time-series analyses, on the other hand, are extremely useful to discover patterns and regularities, and give insight into ecosystem functions.