Project 1

Interactions in Underexplored Ecosystems

The project addresses microbiomes that are still poorly understood despite their clinical, environmental, and economic relevance. We explore interactions within the human small intestine in health and disease, as well as shifting microbial interactions triggered by environmental invasive species acting as vectors for microbial pathogens.

It is widely accepted that we need a better understanding of microbial dynamics within the human small intestine, but the system has remained understudied due to problems of reliable access. We leverage our ability to reliably sample the small intestine in patient cohorts to fill this knowledge gap.

The second work package (WP) asks how invasive species may act as vectors for microbiomes using two examples, one where an introduced insect species has picked up a bacterial pathogen within the ecosystem it invaded and transferred it to a new host of commercial importance and the second where a marine bivalve is currently replacing a closely- related native species.

Although these systems are diverse, they share focus on interactions within complex animal microbiomes. The common goal is thus to unravel principles of interactions that may lead to more predictability of system behavior but also to uncover hidden consequences of interactions that may ultimately enable interventions.