Towards understanding and designing interactions among critical community members for persistence, activity and protection

Specific interactions among different microbes and microbes and their phage can play critical roles in community assembly, activity and persistence. We are developing measurement technologies and approaches to dissect and design these interactions both to understand their role in natural community function and to design therapeutic interventions for applications in protection against microbial infection. We will show how we are combining high throughput genetic, metabolic profiling and scaling phenotyping to create datasets that allow us to infer interactions, illuminate their mechanistic basis, and exploit these interactions for our purposes using examples that span environmental and health applications.