Manoshi Datta

HFSP Postdoctoral Fellow

Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

About me

I am a microbial ecologist working with Roy Kishony in the Faculty of Biology at the Technion. I am strongly motivated by the dream of designing and engineering microbial communities in the human body to treat infectious diseases. To this end, I am working towards the following long-term goals:

Community assembly: Characterizing the complex dynamical processes by which microbes form structured communities in the human body
Community evolution: Predicting how human-associated microbial communities evolve in response to environmental change, including treatment with antibiotics
Community spatial structure: Developing novel tools to interrogate microbial communities in the human body at the scale of a cellular “neighborhood”

I completed my Ph.D. at MIT in the Computational & Systems Biology Graduate Program, a program at the interface of biology, physics, and computer science. There, I worked with Jeff Gore, Martin Polz, and Otto Cordero to study microbial communities as complex dynamical systems. My approach is inspired by classical ecology and mathematical theory, but anchored to reality with measurements in the laboratory and the field.

Interests

Antibiotic resistance
Environmental microbiology
Dynamical systems

Education

PhD in Computational & Systems Biology, 2016

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
BSc in Bioengineering, 2010

University of California, Berkeley
BSc in Chemical Biology, 2010

University of California, Berkeley

News

June 6, 2018: How does copepod host physiology shape their associated bacterial communities? We explore this question in our new paper, Inter-individual variability in copepod microbiomes reveals bacterial networks linked to host physiology.
May 4, 2018: Nate, Arolyn, and I put our new paper, Rapid, inexpensive measurement of synthetic bacterial community composition by Sanger sequencing, on bioRxiv!
March 26, 2018: I was awarded an HFSP Long-Term Fellowship! I’m excited to have the opportunity to pursue my interests in microbial community evolution on the human body.
September 15, 2017: I started as a postdoc in Roy Kishony’s lab at the Technion.
April 29, 2016: I defended my Ph.D. thesis, the outcome of a truly transformative academic journey.

Research

Microscale microbial ecology

What does the world look like to a microbe?

Microbial evolution

How do microbes diversify their metabolic capabilities, and how does this influence their population dynamics?

Computational methods

Improving how we do microbial ecology, one R package at a time

Selected Publications

Rapid, inexpensive measurement of synthetic bacterial community composition by Sanger sequencing

Here, we introduce a new approach for quantifying composition in synthetic bacterial communities based on Sanger sequencing. Using synthetic communities of marine bacterial isolates, we show that this approach yields accurate and reproducible abundance estimates for two-, four-, and seven-strain bacterial communities. Furthermore, this approach can provide results within one day and costs ~5 USD per sample.

Nathan Cermak*, Manoshi S Datta*, Arolyn Conwill

bioRxiv, 2018

Code Paper

Microbial interactions lead to rapid micro-scale successions on model marine particles

Here, we track the taxon and trait dynamics of bacteria attached to model marine particles and demonstrate that particle-attached communities undergo rapid, reproducible successions driven by ecological interactions. These results suggest that primary successions may shape particle-attached bacterial communities in the ocean and that rapid community-wide metabolic shifts could limit rates of marine particle degradation.

Manoshi S Datta, Elzbieta Sliwerska, Jeff Gore, Martin F Polz, Otto X Cordero

Nature Communications, 2016

Paper

Range expansion promotes cooperation in an experimental microbial metapopulation

In this study, we have used a yeast experimental system to explore the effect of range expansions on the maintenance of cooperative behaviors, which commonly display frequency- and density-dependent selection and are widespread in nature. We found that range expansions favor the maintenance of cooperation in two ways: (i) through the enrichment of cooperators at the front of the expanding population and (ii) by allowing cooperators to outrun an invading wave of defectors.

Manoshi S Datta, Kirill S Korolev, Ivana Cvijovic, Carmel Dudley, Jeff Gore

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013

Paper

Recent Publications

More Publications

Manoshi S Datta*, Amalia A Almada*, Mark F Baumgartner, Tracy J Mincer, Ann M Tarrant, Martin F Polz. Inter-individual variability in copepod microbiomes reveals bacterial networks linked to host physiology. The ISME Journal, 2018.

Paper

Tim N Enke*, Manoshi S Datta*, Julia Schwartzman, Nathan Cermak, Desiree Schmitz, Julien Barrere, Otto X Cordero. Modular assembly of polysaccharide-degrading microbial communities in the ocean. bioRxiv, 2018.

Paper

Nathan Cermak*, Manoshi S Datta*, Arolyn Conwill. Rapid, inexpensive measurement of synthetic bacterial community composition by Sanger sequencing. bioRxiv, 2018.

Code Paper

Contact

mdatta@technion.ac.il
Kishony Lab, Faculty of Medicine, Technion, Haifa, Israel