Building Better Ecosystems: The Rise of Synthetic Microbial Ecology season 2026 - 2027

The MICA division is offering a a second seasonof the webinar series on the theme of synthetic microbial ecology for building better microbial ecosystems. These monthly webinars are intended for an international audience of researchers and students, and designed to facilitate interaction between experts in the field.

If you would like to receive information by email about this webinar series, please complete this form at: framaforms.org/Webinar-series

Synthetic microbial ecology

Studying the biological role of microbial communities is both complex and challenging, yet this knowledge offers significant potential for applications across various domains of life sciences from health to the environment. By deciphering the interactions among species within microbial communities and how these species interact with their biotope, we can devise strategies to engineer these communities to achieve specific applications.

Thus, the emerging field of synthetic microbial ecology makes use of knowledge-driven design and construction of microbial communities with the purpose of both understanding them as a functional unit and to tailor their properties. This approach has the potential to pave the way for new technologies for a wide range of applications, including bioremediation, biofuel production, food fermentation and medicine.

In synthetic microbial ecology, microbial communities are engineered in the laboratory, usually consisting of a limited number of strains or species selected for their desirable traits. Researchers control the community composition and environmental conditions to study species interactions and their impact on the community’s functionality.

This controlled setting allows for the isolation and identification of factors driving community assembly and functionality, crucial insights for developing new microbiome engineering methods.

A fastgrowing discipline

The field is currently experiencing rapid growth, driven by advancements in high-speed sequencing, meta-omics (including metagenomics and meta-transcriptomics), genome-scale modeling, genome-editing technologies and culturomic strategies enhancing the microbial resources available for such design.

Bringing together researchers from diverse disciplines such as microbial ecology, genomics, bioinformatics and modeling is key in developping these new tools and technologies that are helping to unlock the potential of synthetic microbial ecology. However, despite its advancements, the field is still in its infancy and somewhat disorganized. There is a lack of consensus on fundamental definitions, protocols, and methodologies.

To achieve this, the researchers already active in this new discipline need to organize themselves and capitalize on collective research efforts. For this purpose, we launch a series of webinars titled “Building Better Ecosystems: The Rise of Synthetic Microbial Ecology” to bring together the synthetic microbial ecology community, fostering collaboration and standardization across the field.

SAVE THE DATES!

Starting in october 2026, the webinars are scheduled monthly until June 2027, usually on Tuesday from 16:00 to 17:00, Central European Time:

13^th October 2026 - Jin-Ho Jun
3^rd November 2026 - Orkun Soyer
1^st December 2026 - Sara Mitri
12^th January 2027 -
16^th February 2027 - Simon Labarthe
16^th March 2027 -
13^th April 2027 - Wenying Shou
11^th May 2027 - Hélène Falentin
15^th June 2027 -

All webinars will be in English.

Contact

Scientific contacts: Eric Dugat-Bony, Thibault Nidelet, Kim Milfersted

In this folder

Tuesday November 3rd 2026, 4:00 to 5:00 pm (CET): Orkun SOYER will present his webinar with the title "Towards predictive assembly of stable, self-sustaining cyanobacterial communities"

Tuesday October 13th 2026, 4:00 to 5:00 pm (CEST): Jin-Ho YUN will present his webinar with the title "Better together: Engineering microalgae and microbial partnerships for carbon valorization"

Modification date: 20 October 2026 | Publication date: 01 September 2026 | By: LM MICA

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