How do microbes interact with animals?

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Research Summary

In nature, there are no animals without a microbiome, and most microbes are beneficial or harmless to their hosts. As such, animal, plant, and other hosts are termed holobionts to reflect they are an assemblage of host and microbial cells. This newly appreciated complexity in host-microbe associations is an inflection point for the life sciences that few could have predicted just a couple of decades ago. Looking further back, Darwin and the 20th-century pioneers of biology would have been astonished to see the countless roles that symbiosis and the microbiome play in animal evolution. A major line of research in our laboratory harkens back to Darwin’s Origin of Species, but in the present-day light of symbiosis. We ask:

  • How do closely related animal species vary in their microbial communities?
  • Does host genetic variation affect these microbiome differences?
  • And what is the role of bacterial symbiosis and microbiomes in animal speciation?

To put this work in context, the origin of species is most often studied with genetic approaches that quantify the number and types of nuclear genes involved in reproductive isolation. Yet in 1927 after discovering that mitochondria were bacterial derived, Dr. Ivan Wallin suggested that bacterial symbionts were fundamental to host evolution. In the 1970’s, Dr. Lee Ehrman showed for the first time that hybrid sterility between fly species could be cured with antibiotics. In the 1990’s, Dr. Lynn Margulis advocated that microbial symbiosis is central to speciation, though she never conducted experiments on this topic. The field then lay dormant with few exceptions. We are now pursuing a comprehensive set of studies on how symbiosis and the microbiome help drive the origin of new animal species.

Select Publications

PLOS Biology Open Highlight – Evolving as a Holobiont

YouTube – Talk from U. Michigan Early Career Scientists Symposium 2015, The Microbiome and Darwin’s Mystery of Mysteries

Blog Post – The Story Behind the Review

Blog Post – ASM’s Small Things Considered