Holobiont Urbanism: Towards Metrics for Smart Cities that Span Scales and Species with Dr. Elizabeth Henaff, NYU Tandon
Abstract: In the era of computational genomics, a great deal of progress has been made in determining the relationships between genetic information and the development of multicellular organisms: plants, animals, humans. But what’s become increasingly clear is that all these organisms owe meaningful aspects of their development and phenotype to interactions with the microorganisms – bacteria or fungi – with which they live in symbiosis.
Those microbes are an integral part of, and are affected by, our environment. As such, the microbiome – whether it lives on the skin, gut, subway, office – manifests the continuum between organism and environment. With its potential to elucidate the relationship between the environment and human health, it is arguably the most urgent metric in the era of smart cities. Here we present methods and metrics for data-driven discussions of our holobiont built environments.