The following couse will be offered within the Theodor Escherich Symposium 2026 in Graz, Austria.
The course is limited to 30 participants and will be free of charge.
What is this about?
Just like us, microbes rarely live alone, instead living in large microbial communities consisting of up to thousands of different strains that interact with each other and their environment. The functional repertoire of species is encoded by their specific genome; however, how they will interact with other strains and their environment cannot be deduced from genomic sequences alone.
One approach to predict those interactions is metabolic modeling, a mechanistic computational modeling approach that infers growth rates and metabolic fluxes across the entire microbial community. This workshop will provide hands-on training on metabolic modeling, starting from genome sequences of individual strains all the way to predicting metabolic interactions and the effect of potential interventions in full microbiota. The course will use examples from the human gut microbiome, but the acquired skills will work for any microbial consortium.
What will I learn?
In this workshop, you will learn to:
- Build strain-specific metabolic models from isolate genomes using GAPSEQ.
- Gapfill metabolic models to produce biomass with and without a known growth medium/environment.
- Master the basics of flux balance analysis for strain-level metabolic models.
- Simulate whole microbial communities with MICOM.
- Quantify engraftment and microbial interactions.
- Simulate environmental disruptions and interventions.
Date and Time
Med Uni Campus SR 87
Neue Stiftingtalstraße 6, 8010 Graz
02.11.2026, 09.00 - 15.00 CEST
What will I need?
You will need to bring your laptop and have access to a (free) Google account. No software needs to be installed beforehand—you only need a web browser. The course will use a computational environment hosted on Google Colab.
Team
- Christian Diener
- Geoffrey Olweny
Sponsoring & Support This workshop is supported by the Medical University of Graz, and the FWF Cluster of Excellence Microbiomes Drive Planetary Health (Synthesis Module).