SysGen Seminar – Olivier Chapleur – 13th October, 2017

Olivier

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Andrew Siebel

asiebel@unimelb.edu.au

T: +61 3 8344 0707

Olivier Chapleur

National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture (IRSTEA), Paris, France

Friday 13th October
12-1pm
FW Jones Theatre, Level 3 Medical Building, The University of Melbourne

‘omics datasets integration: could it help improve waste degradation?

Abstract
Anaerobic digestion (AD) is a complex microbiological process of degradation of the organic matter which produces biogas rich in methane. It is successfully used to manage different types of waste and produce energy at an industrial scale. However, it is not fully controlled and exploited, mainly due to the absence of microbial-based management tools. This might be about to change with the advent of ‘omics methodologies in AD. My lab has established novel experimental strategies to monitor the microbiome of AD samples along with ‘meta-omics’ high-throughput technologies. Our aim is to study different types of `omics biological molecules from a community of organisms, or microbiome, e,g. DNA, RNA, proteins, or metabolites to deepen our understanding of AD.

This talk will focus on two time-course experiments testing the influence of temperature and inhibitors on the performances of AD. We applied different statistical strategies to identify different patterns of microbial dynamics and relate them with the evolution of degradation performances. I will discuss how our integrative analyses may help gain a better understanding of the interplay between microbial dynamics and activity, metabolic pathways and macroscopic degradation performances, and how this work constitutes a first step towards biomarkers for functional diagnosis of AD digesters. I will also share my journey as a microbiologist currently visiting dry laboratories in both France and Australia to learn statistical tools to analyse my own data.

Bio
Dr Chapleur is a research scientist at the National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture (IRSTEA) in Paris, France. He was awarded his PhD in 2012 from the Paris Institute of Technology for Life, Food and Environmental Science, France. He has a strong background in microbial ecology and molecular biology. His current research focus is on understanding the microbial drivers of a biodegradation process, the anaerobic digestion (AD). This natural process is commonly exploited in industrial plants to degrade organic waste but needs to be better controlled. Dr Chapleur is a specialist of ‘omics’ approaches and uses them to characterise the effect of different types of perturbations on the microbiota of AD process. To be able to fully exploit large datasets his techniques are generating, Dr Chapleur decided to dedicate six months of his time in 2017 to learn how analyse and integrate ‘multi-omics’ data. To that end he initiated a collaboration with the mixOmics team in Toulouse (3 months visit at the Mathematical Institute, Université de Toulouse) and in Melbourne where he is currently visiting the Centre for Systems Genomics in Lê Cao lab.

Enquiries: Andrew Siebel (asiebel@unimelb.edu.au)