Welcome to the Systems Ecology & Evolution Group

We use interdisciplinary approaches to study emergent behavior in microbial systems.

Our group is based at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel and at the Department of Fundamental Microbiology of the University of Lausanne. We are an associate member of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Microbiomes.

About the Group

About 14 billion years ago, the universe started as near uniform ball of energy; today it is full of complex systems, including some that can ponder the question of how all of this came to be. How did this happen? How can complex behavior arise in systems build of relatively simple ingredients? And how do these complex systems evolve and function? These are the questions that fascinate us. 

We study emergent behavior. Complex systems are highly diverse, but there is a common theme: they all consist of large numbers of interacting components. For example, animal bodies and bacterial biofilms consist of many interacting cells; these cells in turn consist of many interacting molecules. Our goal is to develop a quantitative description of how interactions between the components at one level of organization give rise to novel—emergent—behavior at higher levels of organization.  

We work with microbial communities. Microbes are essential for the well-being of humans and our planet: they drive most biogeochemical cycles, strongly affect our health and decease, and are essential for many industrial applications. The functions performed by microbial communities often emerge from interactions between their member species. It is thus essential to understand how these emergent properties arise. Moreover, microbial communities are an ideal model system to study how complex systems function and evolve, because we can measure—and manipulate—the dynamics at all levels of organization, from molecules to complete ecosystems.

We use interdisciplinary approaches. Complex systems can only be understood if we investigate them from all possible viewpoints; we therefore combine concepts from biology, physics, and computer science.  We combine state-of-the-art experimental techniques with novel data analysis methods and mathematical models to create a quantitative description of emergent behavior in microbial systems.