Pranas Grigaitis

Life at various scales is a collaborative effort: many lifeforms are heavily (inter-)dependent on other each other. The organization of life into higher-level units (from individual organisms into communities, eventually ecosystems) is heavily dependent on the metabolic interactions among individuals: as an example, function of gut microbiome is indispensable in some aspects to humans. This situation is somewhat reminiscent of a crafts market, where craftsmen produce goods to trade with each other.

One of the open challenges in microbiology and microbial biotechnology is predicting the composition of microbial communities. However, microbial [metabolic] interactions are so complex that a set of individual microbes usually cannot be translated into a novel community. Can we use economic reasoning to master the principles of how microbial ecosystems come to life?

In 2025, I was awarded the Young Investigator Group Preparatory Program Fellowship at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to develop the research program on metabolic economics of microbial ecosystems (ME-ME). In my research, I rely on computational models of metabolism to explain metabolic strategies of different organisms. I have developed so-called genome-scale metabolic models, representations of organism’s of metabolic capacity based on their genome sequence. To compute and analyze potential metabolic states, I apply elements of economic theory (constrained optimization, yield/benefit analysis) on these models. Data streams coming from high-throughput (-omics) approaches are used to validate of model predictions. Combined, these approaches guide us in answering the question(s) of “what does the cell/organism do?”.

I am a biochemist by training, and, fascinated by the power that mathematics and computers bring to modern biology, I moved towards computational systems biology over the years. I have joined the @Systems Biology Lab at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2019, first as a PhD student. In early 2023, I have defended my PhD Thesis on modeling microbial metabolic strategies here at the Vrije Universiteit. Around that time, I started a post-doc in collaboration with the Systems Biology Lab and the Social Fluids Lab (Uni Cambridge) as a part of a HFSP-funded project on the metabolic division of labor in ant colonies.