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IBEC Seminar: Scaling up in Systems Biology: from a minimal cell to microbiomes
Thursday, October 13, 2016 @ 10:00 am–11:00 am
Scaling up in Systems Biology: from a minimal cell to microbiomes
Maria Lluch Senar, Design of Biological Systems grup, Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG)Ultra-sequencing technologies have allowed the massive identification of human-associated microbiomes. Genome annotations of microbiomes consider conserved ORFs or those encoding for proteins larger than 100aa. However, growing evidence highlight the existence of a hidden universe of small genes (smORFs) encoding for small peptides (SEPs; <100aa), many of them secreted, being involved in infection and quorum sensing. Also, in eukaryotes, small antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are secreted in response to infection. The interplay between these secreted SEPs is essential to control the different human microbiomes to ensure coexistence rather than weakening the host against opportunistic infections. Thus, determining the smORFome of bacterial-host ecosystems and studying its role in homeostasis are essential. In this seminar, I will explain how by using different system biology approaches we discovered this layer of small peptides in Mycoplasma pneumoniae and our future plans to study their role in human microbiomes focusing in female reproductive tract.
