CHE 596 643 Microbial Community Engineering

3 Credit Hours

This course will cover quantitative frameworks and techniques for engineering microbial communities. A brief overview of the major processes and engineering targets in microbial communities will be presented, followed by hands-on practice with computational tools for performing simulations, experimental design, and ‘omics-based analyses. Safety and ethical considerations will be discussed throughout the course, and students will use course concepts to critically evaluate current literature and synthesize a research proposal.

Prerequisite

None.

Course Objectives

By the end of the course, you should be able to do the following things:
● Understand the major routes by which microbial communities impact their surroundings, and be able to enumerate mechanistic targets for engineering interventions.
● Understand the various approaches (e.g. community, strain, and gene-level) for engineering microbiomes.
● Use numerical methods (e.g. flux balance analysis, lotka-volterra equations, agent-based) to simulate the behavior of a microbial community.
● Use statistical and pharmacokinetic approaches to design microbiome engineering experiments, and evaluate the efficacy of an experiment using ‘omics-based computational, statistical, and/or machine learning tools.
● Understand and know how to address safety and ethical concerns in microbial community engineering.
● Critically evaluate current literature in microbial community engineering
● Synthesize and evaluate research proposals involving microbial community engineering.

Grading

Projects (5 plus the Review/Proposal)	90%
Participation	10%

Textbook

None.

Required readings will be posted on Moodle.

Updated 7/8/2020