Symbiotic wonders across the Tree of Life

Why is studying microbe-host relationships essential to understanding and conserving flora and fauna?

Across the Tree of Life, multicellular organisms including ourselves, are home to a diversity of microbes. They inhabit myriad environments, coating the skin, and the leaves and roots of plants, they live in tissues and organs, and even within cells.

In some instances, relationships with microbes are so connected that hosts cannot survive in their absence. This has led to multicellular organisms no longer being viewed as single entities, but rather as holobionts: combinations of multicellular hosts and microbes that mutually influence each other’s behaviour, ecology, and evolution. So, when conserving species, both in the wild and in animal populations under managed care in zoos, we must consider their microbiome too.  

In this event, speakers will introduce how microbe-host relationships vary across select branches of the Tree of Life. These include amphibian microbiomes, the evolution of symbiosis in bark beetles, and the advances in chemistry that are revealing how microbes provide their hosts with pharmacies on-tap. Our keynote guest speaker for the evening, Dr Sarah Knowles, University of Oxford, will present her intriguing work on the gut microbiome of wild mice and how this is reshaping our understanding of mammalian biology.

The Leverhulme Centre for the Holobiont was launched in 2022 as part of a ten-year project to solve some of the great mysteries of holobionts, with of a goal of generating improved and more holistic approaches to species and ecosystem conservation. With this field still in its infancy, fundamental microbiome-multicell relationships must be studied further, and characterised across a swathe of macrobiodiversity.

Speakers, talk titles and biographies

• Professor Thomas Bell, Introduction to the Leverhulme Centre for the Holobiont

Professor Thomas Bell is an expert in the ecology of microbial communities. He is Founding Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Holobiont and Deputy Head of the department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London. He joined Imperial College as a Lecturer in 2011, and concurrently held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship from 2010-2018. He was previously a Departmental Lecturer at the University of Oxford and Beale Tutorial Fellow at St Hilda's College, University of Oxford. Tom holds a BSc (Hons) in Biology from McGill University, Canada, an MSc in Zoology from the University of British Columbia, and a D. Phil. in Zoology from the University of Oxford

• Dr Phil Jervis, Institute of Zoology, ZSL, Conserving the amphibian holobiont

Phil is a postdoctoral research assistant at the ZSL Institute of Zoology as part of the Leverhulme Centre for the Holobiont. His research is centred around characterising the chemical interactions between amphibians and microorganisms. These interactions can explain discrepancies in resilience to infectious disease and predation at both the population and interspecies level. Phil is particularly interested in evolutionary and ecological factors which influence the compounds present, and hence the consequences of these interactions. These factors could include evolutionary history, diet, environment or stress, and may significantly contribute to a population’s survival

• Dr Elliot Murphy, Imperial College London, Iron Competition as the Mediator in Probiotic Inhibition of Chytridiomycosis in the Era of the Holobiont

Elliot is an analytical chemist with an interest in the characterisation of novel chemical structures from natural origins. As part of his PhD in chemistry, received from the University of Galway, Ireland, Elliot studied the potential impact Amphidoma languida toxins could have on the Irish shell fishing industry. During his career in research Elliot has also worked on isolating novel bioactive metabolites from macroalgae and porifera. Currently, Elliot is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Imperial College London with the Holobiont Research Centre funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project aims to better describe the chemical mediators in host-microbe relationships

• Dr Theo Llewellyn, Imperial College London, Unravelling the Evolutionary and Ecological Dynamics of Bark Beetle-Fungal Holobionts

Theo’s research uses a combination of genomics, phylogenetics and ecology to understand the evolution of fungal symbiosis. In their current position as Research Associate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Holobiont, they are working with Professor Alfried Vogler to develop bark beetles and their associated fungi as a new system to explore holobiont evolution and diversification. Before this, Theo completed a PhD at Imperial College and the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, where they studied how lichen-forming fungi adapt to survive in extreme ecosystems

• Keynote: Dr Sarah Knowles, University of Oxford, Of mice and microbes: linking gut microbiome variation to physiology in the wild

Dr Sarah Knowles is Associate Professor of Ecosystem Biology at the University of Oxford’s Department of Zoology. She completed a BA and DPhil in Oxford before becoming a post-doc at the University of Edinburgh, and her current research at Oxford focuses on the mammalian microbiome in the wild. Using wild mice and other rodents as model systems, her group studies both what shapes the microbiome in natural settings but also how it impacts the host. They do this by combining field studies, experiments, computational and comparative approaches

This event will be chaired by Professor Trent Garner.