Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications

Our gastrointestinal tract is inhabited by the earth’s most complex microbial community consisting of trillions of microbes called gut microbiota. The gut microbiota is thought to play a pivotal role in mediating human behavior, human physiology, and a variety of medical conditions including heart failure, cancer, and drug resistance, but the physiological mechanisms underlying these roles still remain elusive. Given its dynamicity, complexity and heterogeneity, it is impossible to tackle this issue without developing sophisticated experimental designs and statistical mechanical methodologies for data collection, analysis and modeling. In this mini-symposium, we will bring together mathematicians, statisticians, microbiologists, computer scientists, and gastrointestinal doctors to search for a way that can unveil the rules of microbial function that take place in our highly packed gut environment. Statisticians will propose elegant designs for data monitoring, gastrointestinal doctors will introduce problems and talk about the approach and ethics of collecting human samples, mathematicians will offer a tool to visualize the topological architecture of microbial interactome networks, and microbiologists will present a synthetic experiment for microbial assembly. All of us want to work together to reach a deep understanding of what is going on in the gut microbiome and how the microbiota exerts its role in shaping host phenotypes. We want to establish a long-term cutting-edge collaborative program in a quest to facilitate the development of new microbiology-inspired mathematical theories and promote the understanding of challenging biomedical problems.