University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Founded in 2003, the UL is a public institution and the first and only university of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. It was set up as a multilingual and international institution and is strongly focused on research. Research focuses on a choice of priority areas.

Within these priorities, the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) was created. The LCSB aims at unravelling the biological mechanisms underlying health and disease with a special emphasis on neurodegenerative diseases using molecular analyses and bioinformatics tools and computational models.

The key research objective of the Eco-Systems Biology (ESB) research group at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg (UL) is to develop and apply molecular systems biology approaches to obtain unprecedented understanding of mixed microbial communities, e.g. gastrointestinal microbiota, their interactions with the environment, e.g. the human host, and how certain microbial community compositions lead to certain outcomes, e.g. pathogenesis. In order to achieve this, the group has recently developed a microfluidics-based in vitro model of the human-microbe gastrointestinal interface called HuMiX. The overall vision of the ESB group is to use high-resolution molecular data, obtained from microbial consortia including those established in the HuMiX model, to construct multi-scale models which will highlight key processes governing microbial community structure and function, and which may inform control strategies for microbial communities in the future, especially in the context of human diseases.

Role in the project: gut-on-a-chip, induced pluripotent stem cells, systems biology, microbiome, multi-omics, metabolism, modelling