The role of microbiota in maintaining health is increasingly studied in humans, animals, plants and soil. The potential impact and utilization possibilities of this knowledge are enormous yet requires collaborations between disciplines that are seemingly not connected. Future Food Utrecht has therefor committed itself to increase the awareness around all work done on microbiota within Utrecht by organizing multiple Conversation Sessions around it. Within these sessions, an UU or UMCU speaker will be accompanied by an external speaker working on a complementary topic to explore new insights and potential future collaborations with the audience.

The first online session focusses on “Mathematical Biology in Microbiota Research”. In this session we will have two presentations: the first will be given by Prof. Roeland Merks and David Versluis, MSc (Leiden University) who will share their mathematical biology view of human intestinal microbiota development. The second speaker, Dr. Yang Song will be introduced by Prof. Corné Pieterse (Utrecht University), and she will tell more about the use of mathematical biology in research on the microbial imprinting for crop resilience.