Rigi Workshop 2025: Microbiome Meets Metabolism

This year, the 30 selected participants, all PhD or Post doc representing 12 different swiss research institutions had the opportunity to discover the transformative power of microbiomes in shaping chemical structures and functions, vital for human and environmental well-being. They were accompanied by 10 invited speakers from Switzerland, US and Germany bridging microbiology and bioinformatics with toxicology, pharmacology and environmental sciences, focusing on cutting-edge methodologies and data science tools. They had the opportunity to present their research during research rounds in small groups, allowing intensive scientific exchanges. Four of the projects were selected to be discussed during a World Café to boost or revamp the project thanks to interdisciplinary feedbacks from all the participants. The feedback of the four Baristas are in the pictures hereafter.

Speakers:

• Dr. Georg Aichinger - ETHZ
  Title: Microbiome-competent Physiologically based kinetic modeling.
  Description: A predictive tool to quantitatively assess the individual impact of gut microbial metabolism on human health”?
• Prof. Dr. Emily Balskus – Harvard University / Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
  Title: Deciphering the human microbiome with chemistry
  Description: I will discuss my research group’s efforts to discover enzymes and metabolites from the gut and vaginal microbiome. Our work shows how understanding the chemical capabilities of the microbiome can guide efforts to understand the biology of the human microbiome and develop therapeutic interventions.
• Prof. Dr. Nicholas Bokulich – ETHZ
  Title of workshop: Metagenome data analysis"
  Description: In this workshop, we will learn about metagenome data acquisition and analysis for profile and predicting functional capacities of microbial communities.
• Prof. Dr. Philipp Engel - Unil - Department of fundamental microbiology
  Title: Metabolic Interplay Between the Honeybee Gut Microbiota and Agrochemicals
  Description: Honey bees are key pollinators that harbor relatively simple yet highly specialized microbial communities in their gut. Pesticides are one of the key stressors affecting bee health. We hypothesize that the bee gut microbiota interacts with many pesticides in a reciprocal manner with important consequences for bee health.
• Prof. Dr. Kristopher McNeill - ETHZ
  Title: Microbial plastic degradation
  Description : I will present on our group’s work studying biodegradation of polyesters in soil, including our efforts to characterize the colonization of the plastic pieces, the enzymatic hydrolysis process, and the fate of the monomers that are released by hydrolysis.
• Dr. Andrew Quinn - Unil
  Introductory workshop: Discussion on the unique challenges in biotransformation research
• Dr. Serina Robinson - EAWAG
  Title: Paired ‘omics analysis
  Description: In this talk, I will cover our research on cultivation-independent techniques to couple meta’omics with functional enzyme and pathway characterization. We aim use such techniques to identify and predict microbial biotransformations.
• Dr. Maria Zimmermann-Kogadeeva - EMBL
  Title: Quantifying microbiota-host interactions
  Description : I will discuss computational approaches to quantify metabolism of single bacteria, their communities and microbiota-host metabolic interactions based on genome-scale metabolic models and physiology-based models.
• Dr. Michael Zimmermann – EMBL
  Title: Metabolic Microbiome Interactions
  Description : We will discuss high-throughput culturomics, metabolomics and genetic approaches to mechanistically link metabolic functions of microbial communities to their bacterial species, strains, and metabolic pathways.

Organisers:

• Dr. Georg Aichinger - ETHZ - Department of Health Sciences and Technology
• Prof. Dr. Kathrin Fenner – Eawag - Department of environmental chemistry and UZH – Department of Chemistry. Swiss Chemical Society
• Prof. Dr. Shana Sturla – ETHZ – Department of Health Sciences and Technology. Swiss Society of Toxicology.
• Caroline Reymond, SCNAT Platform Biology