Kasturi's Website

Research

Currently, I'm a graduate student at Tufts University, MA, USA. Broadly, I am interested in studying various factors that influence how communities of organisms form, and how they change over time in both short (ecological) and long (evolutionary) time scales. I'm also interested in integrating different approaches and techniques to answer these broad questions, such as theoretical predictions, computational simulations, and laboratory experiments.

Current research: Pairwise interactions in sourdough microbial communities

Supervisors: Dr. Lawrence Uricchio, Dr. Benjamin Wolfe (Tufts University)

Can pairwise interactions between sourdough microbes explain the patterns of multi-species community assembly?

Using microbial communities derived from sourdough, I investigated whether we can use Lotka-Volterra models (models based on pairwise interactions between microbes) can explain species' presence and relative abundance. We found that a) In communities of up to nine species, most species’ presence and relative abundance could be reliably predicted based on our model and b) The inclusion of nonequilibrium demography in our model further improved the accuracy of our pairwise model.

How do interactions influence the evolution of microbes?

I plan to study how the evolution of growth parameters (obtained from Lotka-Volterra equations) influences coexistence outcomes. Additionally, I am also interested in looking at how the supply of mutations (effect size, mutation rate, proportion of beneficial to deleterious mutations) changes the trajectory of evolution. Stay tuned for more!

Past research: Evolution of E. coli under UV and antibiotic exposure

Supervisor: Dr. Sutirth Dey (IISER, Pune)

For my Master's degree, I worked on various projects that studied how populations of E. coli evolve under various stressors, such as UV exposure and antibiotics. Here's a project that I worked on.

Publications

Preprints:

Kasturi Lele, Benjamin E. Wolfe, and Lawrence H. Uricchio. "Pairwise interactions and serial bottlenecks help explain species composition in a multi-species microbial community." bioRxiv (2024): 2024-11. (link).

Publications:

Nicolas L. Louw, Kasturi Lele, Ruby Ye, Collin B. Edwards, and Benjamin E. Wolfe. "Microbiome assembly in fermented foods." Annual review of microbiology 77.1 (2023): 381-402. (link)

S Selveshwari, Kasturi Lele, and Sutirth Dey. "Genomic signatures of UV resistance evolution in Escherichia coli depend on the growth phase during exposure." Journal of Evolutionary Biology 34.6 (2021): 953-967. (link)

Kasturi Lele