SEMINAR: Targeting the gut microbiome to treat childhood stunting

Abstract: Childhood stunting affects millions of children worldwide and reflects impaired growth that cannot be explained by nutrition alone. Increasing evidence points to the gut microbiome as a key regulator of growth and metabolic development, yet how microbial functions can be therapeutically harnessed remains poorly understood. This work employs high-throughput compound screening to identify microbiome-based and microbiome-modulating therapeutics for childhood stunting. Lead candidates were validated in defined in vitro microbial communities and in vivo mouse models of growth impairment. Together, these findings demonstrate how functional microbiome discovery can move beyond association to enable targeted, translational strategies for treating childhood stunting and other microbiome-associated diseases.

Bio: Nermin Akduman obtained her BSc in Biology from Hacettepe University in Ankara, Türkiye, and her MSc in Biological Sciences from Seoul National University in Seoul, South Korea. She completed her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen, Germany, where she studied how bacterial diet influences nematode behavior at the molecular level. She subsequently conducted postdoctoral research in Professor Lisa Maier’s laboratory at the M3 Research Institute in Tübingen, focusing on the development of microbiome-based therapeutics for childhood stunting. She is currently an ARISE2 Fellow at EMBL Heidelberg, where she develops high-throughput, AI-enabled platforms for microbial isolation and characterization to support functional microbiome research.