Cleber Ouverney, Associate Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, San Jose State University
Thursday, February 23, 2012, 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM
Location: Physical Sciences Building, Room 240
Hosted By Nader Pourmand

Abstract:

This talk will merge the fields of environmental and medical microbiology, and demonstrate that environmental microbes may be used as model organisms for better understanding the role uncultured bacteria play in human health.  The prokaryotic domains, Bacteria and Archaea, are made primarily of uncultured phylum-level lineages known as Candidate Divisions.  Little is known about these uncultured microbes. It is reasonable to speculate, however, that because numerous cultivable bacteria have been shown to be instrumental in human development, health and diseases, it is reasonable to speculate that strains from uncultured groups, which comprise nearly 80% of the human gut and 68% of human oral microbial consortia, participate in similar functions. The study of human-associated uncultured prokaryotes, however, has many practical limitations, such as access to patient samples, unpredictable microbial composition, and low relative abundance, all of which challenge experimental promptness and reproducibility. We propose an approach that circumvents challenges imposed by sampling humans, provides an alternative strategy to characterizing some diseases of unknown etiology, and renders a much needed understanding of the ecophysiological role hundreds of unique prokaryotes play in mixed microbial communities.

Biography:

Cleber C Ouverney is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at San Jose State University.  He is particularly interested in the role uncultured prokaryotes play in complex microbial communities.  He received his PhD in Marine Microbial Ecology from the University of Southern California, characterizing natural complex microbial communities from sea surface to nearly 4,000 meter-deep sites in the Pacific Ocean.  He then worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University, where he applied similar ecological approaches, but instead of the ocean, he studied the uncultivated prokaryotes associated with the human body.  His current research interests seek to merge environmental and medical microbiology to determine the role uncultured Bacteria and Archaea play in human health. He is funded by NIH to establish an environmental model of the uncultured bacterium known as TM7, found in a diversity of environments, but also in association with human oral diseases. His team of undergraduate and master’s research students recently proposed an environmental TM7 strain as model organism to study its counterparts in humans.