Keio University Human Biology-Microbiome-Quantum Research Center (WPI-Bio2Q) held a seminar as follows.

15:00 -16:00, March 12, 2026

Venue:
2F Meeting Room, Center for Integrated Medical Research, Shinanomachi Campus, Keio University

Arjun S. Raman, MD PhD
Assistant Professor,　Department of Pathology
The University of Chicago
USA

“Statistical design of a synthetic microbiome that suppresses diverse gut pathogens”

Engineering functional bacterial consortia holds great promise for addressing challenges facing humanity today but is a substantial challenge due to complexity: emergent interactions arise from interactions between strains that are unpredictable from considering the properties of strains in isolation. We successfully engineered a 15-member complex bacterial consortium (‘SynCom15’) that clears multidrug resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae through a statistical process agnostic to strain phenotype, strain-strain interactions, or mechanism of action. This statistical process—’Constraint Distillation’—yielded SynCom15 through zero-shot design: no iteration and optimization required. Our work opens the possibility of statistical design for enabling synthetic ecology.