Oh, I forgot: I also make memes! They are pretty niche and mainly for internal use, but here is one for the holobiont lovers out there:

In the new preprint, we provide a detailed comparison between MPs and existing pathway definitions, both in terms of their key properties and methods for pathway enumeration.

Finally, Axel Theorell had the great idea of applying MPs directly to microbial community design!

Using MPs, he enumerated minimal butyrate-producing communities of human gut bacteria that agreed well with experimental butyrate production data without parameter estimation. 🧫

Next, we predicted metabolite exchanges between cells in a very big host-microbe model of the human gut.

By sequentially constraining the model, we were able to sample and eventually enumerate all metabolite exchanges supporting microbial growth and human energy generation. 🧑

First, we randomly sampled MPs in E. coli central carbon metabolism within the full genome-scale network.

We calculated the frequencies of reactions and enzymes in the sampled MPs, and these frequencies correlated well with growth data for single and multiple gene knockouts. 🦠

Great talk on dynamic microbial community FBA and microbial relationship advice by @morofrancesco17 😄

Want to get detailed predictions of metabolic activities for your 16S data? Stop by my poster at #isme19 tomorrow (Tuesday) to learn how machine learning can help 😄