Time and Space for Conversation Catalyzed Scialog Fellows’ Collaboration
They didn’t write a Scialog proposal together, but two Fellows began a conversation at the Scialog: Molecules Come to Life meeting in 2016 that led to a recent paper in Cell. Highlighted in a perspective article, their research could offer new insights into global climate.
Seppe Kuehn, Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, and Madhav Mani, Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, Northwestern University, had met before the Scialog meeting but never collaborated.
“At that time we were still a long way from the ideas that were recently published,” said Kuehn. “Scialog just gave us a chance to talk.”
Their continued conversation led eventually to the research detailed in their paper, “Genomic structure predicts metabolite dynamics in microbial communities.” Over the years, Mani and Kuehn’s discussions centered around making connections between scales of biological organization: How do genes affect phenotypes? How do phenotypes collectively define a community? Ultimately, in the context of microbial ecology, the two set out to see if they could quantitatively predict metabolite dynamics in a community from the genomes of each community member.
The surprising results of their research, blending physics, applied math and quantitative measurements, could allow a deeper understanding of the metabolic impact microbes have on hosts and the climate using sequencing data alone.
Kuehn said it is important to emphasize the value of multidisciplinary brainstorming and the creativity it can inspire in catalyzing novel research.
“Unstructured discussions without goals or particular funding calls in mind are essential and increasingly rare,” he said. “This work is the outcome of precisely this type of interaction.”
Kuehn and Mani now plan to push these ideas and methods to the next level by beginning to interrogate wild communities in complex settings, in particular in soils.
“We think there is a lot of space for a physics approach to build predictive and quantitative theories of metabolic activity in such complex systems,” Kuehn said.
Mani said Scialog’s interactive format – “not the usual 10 talks over two days” – is incredibly valuable in “identifying beautiful and creative questions that are distinct from the inertia in the field.”
“To come together with people outside your convex hull to have more open-minded conversations can lead to the most creative work,” said Mani. “Speaking as a theorist especially, these sorts of things really matter.”
