Speaker
Louis Cohen
(Imperial College London)
Description
Understanding symbiotic interactions between soil organisms is important to understand how edaphic ecosystems contribute to ecosystem functioning, as well as plant health and nutrition. Traditional techniques are limited in their ability to capture the spatial and temporal dynamics of these interactions. Microfluidic, or "on-a-chip", technology aims to fill this methodological gap through the manufacturing of custom-designed simplified micro-environments. Current microfluidic research has focused on single organism studies, but the next frontier is combining multiple interacting organisms into a "symbiosis-on-a-chip".
