School of Infection & Immunity

Dr Leonardo Mancini  

 

  • Lecturer in One Health Microbiology (University of Glasgow)
  • Location: Sir Graeme Davies Building Common Room

 

Title: Organization of polymicrobial communities from a bottom-up, single cell perspective: from causes to consequences

Synopsis:

Both in the healthy and in the diseased body, microbes come together in polymicrobial communities producing rich ecologies. Interactions with the local environment lead to the emergence of spatial patterning, which is likely to have strong repercussions on substrate transformation, virulence and treatment susceptibility. Sequencing approaches with low temporal and spatial resolution are now helping us build an understanding of the organ-specific microbiota, establishing correlations between the presence/absence of certain microbes and disease, its severity, and treatment efficacy. The understanding of mechanisms requires microscale studies of microbe-microbe and host-microbe interactions, but they are rarely performed.

Leveraging multi-disciplinary approaches, my research brings pathogenic microbial communities in the focus of the microscope. Building communities and environments from the bottom-up and leveraging multi-disciplinary approaches, I aim to understand how the microenvironment shapes polymicrobial communities and how this leads to emergent properties such as virulence and treatment survival. This will allow us to understand how microbes interact in different contexts and formulate novel prevention and treatment strategies to limit the evolution of antimicrobial resistance.

In my talk, I will particularly focus on the role of spatial structure and mechanical forces in regulating the ecology of a polymicrobial community involved in chronic lung infections. Using microfluidic experiments and simulations, I will show that the interplay of morphological adaptations and spatial structure can give rise to spatial organization and an otherwise impossible coexistence among human pathogens.

 

Bio:

PhD UoEdinburgh with Teuta Pilizota (biology/physics) on bacterial energetics

Postdoc UoCambridge with Pietro Cicuta (physics) on AMR

Herchel Smith postdoc fellow UoCambridge with Pietro Cicuta (physics) and Martin Welch (biochemistry) on microbial ecology

Lecturer SBOHVM on one health microbial ecology

First published: 19 August 2025

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