Congratulations to Eran Agmon for becoming a project investigator on the newly funded NIH MOSAIC (Modeling Of Sex-specific metabolism Across Interacting Communities) project, part of NIH’s new $21 million Computational Modeling of Hormone Homeostasis Initiative. The initiative is advancing human-based computational models to better understand how sex-specific hormone dynamics influence treatment response, efficacy, and toxicity. MOSAIC will develop an open-source, multiscale computational framework connecting hormones, metabolism, microbial communities, tissue physiology, and therapeutic interventions across the body, initially focusing on bacterial vaginosis and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease. Agmon and the CCAM team will lead the project’s software development and multiscale model-integration effort, building the infrastructure that connects metabolic, microbiome, agent-based, and whole-body physiological models into a unified computational system. The collaboration includes Glynis Kolling, Shayn Peirce-Cottler, Monique Vaughan, and Isabelle Derré at the University of Virginia; Feilim Mac Gabhann at Johns Hopkins University; Salman Khetani at the University of Illinois Chicago; Kelly Arnold and Vincent Young at the University of Michigan; and Eran Agmon at UConn Health.

NIH announcement: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-launches-21-million-initiative-improve-understanding-sex-specific-hormonal-biology

Congratulations to PI Dr. Agmon for renewing NSF Center for Chemical Currencies of a Microbial Planet (C-CoMP), which has been funded for a second five-year phase through 2031. Based at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, C-CoMP brings together oceanographers, microbiologists, chemists, computational modelers, and educators to understand how marine microbes and the metabolites they exchange regulate one of the largest carbon fluxes on Earth. Phase 2 will focus on how these microbial processes vary from daily and seasonal cycles to long-term changes in the ocean, with a major goal of connecting cellular-scale microbial metabolism to regional and global ocean biogeochemical models. Agmon and the CCAM team will lead key aspects of this multiscale modeling effort, developing Vivarium-based “translators” that connect genome-scale metabolic models of microbial communities with ocean biogeochemical models, allowing information to move bidirectionally between cellular and ecosystem scales; Agmon will also contribute to dynamic FBA modeling and AI/ML approaches for cross-scale integration. The collaboration includes Elizabeth Kujawinski and Mak Saito at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Mary Ann Moran and Art Edison at the University of Georgia; Sonya Dyhrman and Sarah Hurley at Columbia University; Scott Doney at the University of Virginia; Daniel Segrè at Boston University; Rogier Braakman at MIT; Markus Covert at Stanford University; A. Murat Eren at the Marine Biological Laboratory; Nick Bates at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences/Arizona State University; Mara Freilich at Brown University; Laura O’Dwyer at Boston College; and Eran Agmon at UConn Health, among a broader C-CoMP research community spanning multiple institutions.

C-CoMP: https://ccomp-stc.org/