The UNC Microbiome Core invites you to our March First Friday Microbiome Seminar, featuring Dr. José M. Bruno-Bárcena (Professor, Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, NC State).
Microbiomes Under Pressure: How Flow and Stress Shape Physiology in Packed-Bed Reactors
Microbes don’t live in calm, static worlds. They live in motion—under flow, under stress, and in constant competition. These forces shape everything from gut health and plant resilience to wastewater treatment and industrial fermentation.
In this seminar, Dr. Bruno-Bárcena will showcase packed-bed reactors as deceptively simple yet powerful systems for studying microbial communities growing on surfaces under flow. By controlling hydrodynamics and environmental stress, these models make it possible to see how physical forces drive community assembly, metabolic activity, and microbial interactions—insights that are often invisible in traditional lab cultures.
Why this matters: understanding how microbes behave in dynamic environments can help us design better probiotics, improve crop sustainability, optimize biomanufacturing, and manage biofilms in clinical and industrial settings.
Whether you study microbiomes, engineer microbial systems, work in health or agriculture, or are simply curious about the unseen forces shaping microbial life, this talk offers a rare look at microbes in motion.
