Friends, foes and phages in the phyllosphere

---

The future of human health, sustainable agriculture, and resilience to global change rests on our ability to view microbial ecology and evolution as part of the solution rather than the problem. This is because plants and animals evolved in a microbial world, and thus their entire evolutionary history is shaped by: (i) defending against pathogenic microbial organisms; (ii) leveraging the information, nutrients, and other fitness benefits provided by association with mutualistic and/or commensal microbial organisms; and (iii) adapting to habitats and ecosystems that are themselves shaped by the microbial organisms inhabiting them. 

Our research seeks to unravel the dynamic ecological and evolutionary relationships among hosts, microbiomes (including viruses), and their pathogens using observational and field studies, application and development of theory, and in vitro and in vivo empirical and ‘omics’ approaches. The ultimate goals of the research program are to better predict and manipulate microbiome assembly and function, to gain new insights to the role of microbial interactions in shaping a plant or animal host’s susceptibility, and ultimately to leverage this foundational knowledge to increase plant and animal health, agricultural sustainability, and community resilience to global change. 

We use plants as model systems to address these questions. This includes phyllosphere (leaf-associated) bacterial and phage communities living naturally within long-lived tree hosts (primarily pear trees), and shorter-lived tomato plants in the field/greenhouse/laboratory. More recently, group members have been expanding our list of systems to include pitcher plants, strawberry plants, arabidopsis, and lichens!

Our overall approach is to use natural systems to identify general patterns in disease ecology and evolution, and then to test for specific processes underlying these patterns in the laboratory using experimental (co)evolutionary techniques.We combine laboratory-based, experimental evolution techniques with field studies of natural interactions between hosts and symbionts to identify and address fundamental questions about community structure, coevolution, and abiotic environment as driving forces of diversity.

---

Cross-scale understanding of the assembly, stability, and function of host-associated microbiomes.  Our work integrates ecological and evolutionary conceptual frameworks with microbiological and sequenced-based approaches to gain insight into microbiome assembly and function, within-microbiome interactions, and the role that microbiota and phages play in shaping disease. The group integrates information from pairwise interactions in vitro, where molecular mechanisms can more easily be uncovered, to ecologically relevant but highly controlled microcosm and/or plant experiments, to natural systems, linking these data across systems and scales through application of existing models and development of new theory.

---

---

---