Research

Harnessing the social transmission of microbiota to improve health and immunity with Dr Josh Firth and Dr Sarah Knowles

Sociality holds various consequences for individuals’ health in many species. In particular, one consequence of sociality is microbe transfer. Yet microbe exchange can be simultaneously beneficial and costly, transmitting both pathogens and healthy microbiota depending on host and microbe ‘environment’ (e.g. host immune system, microbe community composition, and host social contacts). This trade-off underlies social interactions and can have life-long impacts on health. Social interactions determine the network of a population, and thus the constraints of how microbes can spread. Across a population, the microbiome exists as a metacommunity. To understand microbiome dynamics —and their implications for human health—a social network-based approach is required. I will use social network analysis to determine microbiome metacommunity dynamics and what impacts these changes have on human health and immunity. To do this, I will examine how specific network structures affect the spread of contagions, how different interactions between contagions produce different dynamics of microbe abundance, and how we can use these findings to subsequently identify dynamics and interactions in real-world populations. As a framework, I will use simulations to formulate hypotheses that can be tested against empirical data, thus providing a toolkit to decode the ecological interactions underlying observed microbiome patterns.