Francisco Zorrilla

As a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Shinichi Sunagawa’s lab at ETH Zürich, Francisco has ~6 years of research experience in developing and applying computational tools to study metabolic interactions within diverse microbiomes. During his PhD with Prof. Patil, Francisco established a metagenomics-driven metabolic modelling workflow, metaGEM, which allows users to reconstruct genomes and metabolic models directly from metagenomics data. Beyond method development, Francisco has applied metagenomics and metabolic modelling to study plastic degradation in the global ocean microbiome, the distribution of auxotrophies in soil microbes, pathogen invasion in the human gut microbiome, as well as industrially relevant microbial interactions that shape cheese flavor formation. Currently, Francisco is working on incorporating protein structural information for metabolic model reconstruction, as well as the computational design of synthetic microbial communities.

February 2025