The Bordenstein laboratory endeavors to understand, optimize, and disseminate the principles that shape interactions between animals, microbes, and viruses and the basic, translational, and clinical outcomes of these interactions. Key questions that drive the science and applications:

1. What are the rules of human microbiome variation, and how do they intersect with health disparities?
2. How does a bacteriophage in an endosymbiont underpin a global pandemic (Wolbachia) and a major mosquito control strategy?
3. What are the rules of microbiome and virome variation across host species? What genetic factors influence phylosymbiosis?
4. How do microbes assist the origin of new host species?
5. How can science education rethink student achievement for high schools, colleges, and citizen scientists? 6. How can students infuse themselves in discovery-based research to learn scientific concepts, make new discoveries, and apply hands-on biotechnology?

We are interested in the evolutionary, genetic, and biochemical principles that shape interactions within the host-microbiome consortia, also known as the holobiont. Our long term goal is to combine knowledge from humans and animal model systems to define what are the rules of microbiome and symbiosis variation within and between animal species. We seek to answer three main questions: (1) What human features (genes, diet, sociality, etc) robustly impact the microbiome, metabolome, and disease risk phenome? (2) What animal genes affect colonization, replication, and maternal transmission of bacteria such as the inherited Wolbachia endosymbiont in arthropods? (3) What is the degree of phylogenetic signal on animal-associated microbiomes (aka, phylosymbiosis); simply put, do phylogenetically-related species have more similar microbiomes? If the answer is yes, then is phylosymbiosis consequential to host biology?