Vitor Marquioni Monteiro

About his PostDoc project

A myriad of microbes inhabits inside our guts. They are not only responsible for the fermentation of non-digestible compounds, but also play an important role in our health. Many different diseases, ranging from metabolic to psychological ones, have shown  important correlations with the microbial diversity within the gut, and although many studies on diets and nutrition have focused on the intake of macronutrients (e.g. proteins and carbohydrates), the microbial content of the food we ingest is also of medical relevance. Whenever such microbes which are present in our food migrate to the gut, they compete for space and nutrients with the previous resident microbes, thus changing their abundances and, as a consequence, the diversity. In order to study how the feeding process affects such diversity, we develop mathematical models that aim to capture general features of such process, like the amout of microbes in the food and the frequency of meals. Mainly, because eating is often intermittent, i.e., separated by time intervals, we aim to understand what are the effects on the gut microbial diversity resulting from such aspect. Our mathematical toolkit encompasses dynamical systems and stochastic processes techniques, and we also perform numerical simulations of the models we deal with.