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Talk by Christoph Ratzke

Title: "Systems Biology of Microbial Communities: Can we make sense of the mess?"
Occasion: CRC -Seminar
Start: 06.11.2025, 16:15
Location: CellNanOs, 38/201

About the speaker: Dr. Christoph Ratzke conducts research at the Cluster of Excellence CMFI, University of Tübingen.

Microbial communities are among the most complex and fascinating systems in nature. Within them, countless microbes interact to produce emergent functions that far exceed the capabilities of any single species. This complexity makes microbial communities essential to both natural ecosystems and human technologies — but also extraordinarily difficult to understand.

My lab combines high-throughput experiments with theoretical modeling to uncover the mechanistic principles that govern these systems. I will present our recent work showing that bringing mechanisticunderstanding to microbial communities requires accounting for dependencies across multiple scales — from single-species physiology and species interactions to the architecture of entire ecological networks.