Our scholarship endeavors to understand “What are the evolutionary and genetic principles that shape interactions between animals and microbes, and what are the major consequences of these interactions?” Towards solving these questions, we employ hypothesis-driven approaches to study two forms of animal-microbe associations: intimate symbioses (between animals, obligate intracellular bacteria and bacteriophages) that impact animal reproduction and vector control, and facultative associations (between free-living organisms) that shape genome and species evolution across the tree of life. Our approaches leverage a wide range of expertise spanning virology, bacteriology, zoology, embryology, genetics, genomics, transcriptomics, ecology, evolution, development, and biochemistry. As symbiosis - the living together of dissimilar organisms - unites diverse subdisciplines in the life sciences, the lab’s scientific output produces both basic and translational outcomes.

Consistent federal funding supports the lab, including two current National Institutes of Health grants and a National Science Foundation grant. Over 90 total publication include recent research articles published in Current Biology, eLife, Nature, PLOS Biology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science. Popular science productions including Atlantic, BBC Radio, CNN, Discover magazine, Huffington Post, The New York Times, PBS, and Scientific American covered this scholarship. Finally, it is important to note that the lab’s output happens with the energy, passion, and curiosity of dedicated and diverse young scientists (55 lab trainees in total from undergraduates to postdocs) who devote themselves to science and education. We are fortunate to work with a responsible and high-performance research group whose quality of expectations matches the quality of their output. Recent investigations study:

A. How does a bacteriophage underpin a global pandemic (Wolbachia) and a major vector control effort?

B. How do animals form relationships with intracellular and free-living bacteria?

C. How do microbes assist the origin of new host species?

D. What is the impact of ethnicity and diet on human gut microbiome viaraton and health disparities?

For more information, please contact Dr. Bordenstein and see the following online resources (we are recruiting students and postdocs):

Laboratory: http://bordensteinlab.vanderbilt.edu/
Twitter: @Symbionticism
Vanderbilt Microbiome Initiative: https://my.vanderbilt.edu/microbiome/
Science Education: https://my.vanderbilt.edu/discover/