必赢bwin线路检测中心定量生物学中心

学术报告 

题    目: Statistical Mechanics of Microbiomes

报告人: Dr. Wenping Cui

Department of Physics, Princeton University

时  间: 8月19日（周二）15:30-16:30

地    点: Zoom线上

https://zoom.us/j/83726102379?pwd=FUOAVb4dIdbMZgJEMQa6VNk6SZMGHO.1

会议号: 837 2610 2379

密码: 123456

主持人: 李志远 研究员

摘要:

Microbial ecosystems represent a fascinating class of complex living systems characterized by coexistence of diverse species, complex interactions, and non-equilibrium dynamics driven by evolution. In this talk, I will present two works of my previous research demonstrating the power of statistical mechanics in providing crucial insights into fundamental ecological questions in microbiome research. First, we ask: When can real microbial communities be treated as random ecosystems? Using random matrix and spin-glass theory, we show that adding modest noise to species’ resource preferences in consumer–resource models induces a transition to “typicality,” where macroscopic ecological properties converge to those of random ecosystems. This highlights inherent limits to predictability in diverse microbiomes and the challenges of scaling bottom-up approaches. Second, we examine the pan-immunity hypothesis in bacteria–phage ecosystems. By extending a Lotka–Volterra framework with eco-evolutionary dynamics, we demonstrate that sufficiently high horizontal gene transfer rates can maintain diverse defense genes in the microbial pan-genome, enabling long-term coexistence despite continual strain extinction. This mechanism provides a theoretical foundation for understanding how distributed immunity emerges at the community level, sustaining the billion-year evolutionary arms race between bacteria and phages.

报告人简介：

Dr. Wenping Cui is currently aPostdoctoral Associate in the Department of Physics at Princeton University (since June 2024). Prior to joining Princeton, he was aPostdoctoral Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics,University of California, Santa Barbara (June 2021 - May 2024).

Dr. Wenping Cui received his B.S. in Astrophysics from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2011. He earned his M.S. in Statistical Physics from the Universität Bonn, Germany, in 2014.  He holds a Ph.D. in Biophysics from Boston College, United States, completed in 2021 under the supervision of Professor Pankaj Mehta.

His research lies at the interface between biology and physics. He is especially interested in identifying general principles governing living organisms using insights from statistical mechanics. https://wenping-cui.github.io//