Welcome to the Bioinformatics Group at the University of Siegen!
Photo credits: Microbiome by Stefanie Peschel from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0), DNA by Jonathan Bailey, NHGRI (CC BY 2.0)
Microbial communities are ubiquitous in the natural and built environment and are associated with many hosts including the human, playing a crucial role for their host’s health. To better understand these complex entities - microbiomes - and to understand their dynamics as a consequence of interactions between members of a microbiome and between microbiomes and their embedding environment, we combine bioinformatics, statistics, and mathematical modeling. Resulting mechanistic models shall both provide causative explanations for experimentally observed microbiome dynamics as well as guide strategies to steer microbiomes as complex adaptive systems towards desired states.