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The Department of Food Science and Nutrition presents its fall 2025 seminar series featuring guest speaker Isai Salas-González, a computational biologist, who will give a presentation on “Deconstructing Community Complexity Through Computational and Evolutionary Biology: From the Emergence of Plant-Microbiome Community-Level Phenotypes to Decomposing Cancer Heterogeneity via Single-Call Genomics.” This seminar will take place on Thursday, October 9, from 12:45–1:45 p.m. over Zoom.

Abstract

At the core, complex biological systems can be decomposed into a set of components whose interaction derived in the emergence of community-level phenotypes. The understanding of the interaction within the components of the system has been enabled by the democratization of genomics and the scalability of next-generation sequencing ultimately yielding massive amounts of data. By the means of computational and evolutionary biology, Salas-González has applied this paradigm to unravel the complexity within the plant-microbiome and its interactions with the plant host. His work in this field permitted to understand basic principles of the emergence of functional modularity within the plant bacterial community and how this community is able to modulate the plant's root architecture to better cope with environmental shifts ultimately promoting plant survival. Jumping from bacterial communities to cancer cellular heterogeneity, he has developed and applied state of the art single-cell genomic technologies to trace the emergence of cancer complexity and heterogeneity.

Biography

Isai Salas-González is a computational biologist with more than 10 years of experience studying a myriad of biological systems, from food-borne pathogens, the maize microbiome, to cancer-derived single cells. He holds a Ph.D in bioinformatics and computational biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, co-advised by professors Jeffery L. Dangl and Corbin D. Jones, and a B.S in genomics from National Autonomous University of Mexico. A passionate lover of literature and art, during his free time it is highly likely you will find him either reading a novel, playing guitar, or in the gym working out.