“If you really want to study evolution, you’ve got go outside sometime, because you’ll see symbiosis everywhere!
LYNN MARGULIS
Welcome!
We are the Marine Symbiomes Research Group.
Basic science is at the heart of our work. We test hypotheses at the intersection of microbial ecology, biogeochemistry and ecosystem ecology to uncover the mechanisms by which host-microbe interactions stimulate diversity and ecosystem functioning in the marine environment.
We chose the term “symbiome”, defined as a complex biotic community in which distinctive metaorganisms (consisting of an host and a community of associated microorganisms) are connected through symbiotic interactions that may range from loose to intimate. The symbiome is maintained in a climax state under the environmental conditions of it habitat.
Read about our fieldwork experiments at Schiacchetiello, where we aimed to disentangle an intimate seagrass-sponge relationship.
In a commentary wrote together with Sairah Malkin from the University of Maryland, we discuss a recent paper by Scholz et al. (2021) investigating the association between the rhizospheres of aquatic vegetation and cable bacteria.
We assessed the impact of zebra mussels on Nitrogen processes in laboratory incubations designed to discern the impact of the microbiome and to quantitatively assess their relevance at the benthic scale.