Evolutionary Hologenomics

In this episode, we chat with Daphne Perlman from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel about her research work in microbiology, as well as scientific illustration and data visualization.
You can find her on Instagram (@daphne.perl) and Twitter (@DaphnePerlman)!

October is Hallowe’en month, so we did a special spooky episode with Rob Dunn from North Carolina State University!

Microbes are everywhere and they are an indivisible part of us, influencing from our health, to the way we smell to even our behaviour.
There are around 200 000 species of microbes in your house! In home hot water heaters there are bacteria similar to those found in hot springs in Iceland, tap water in each city has different microbes depending on where the water comes from and how it is treated. Species in your freezer are similar to those in the Arctic and there are even some that love to live in the microwave!
Cleaning your house too much actually results in selecting for the 2% that are the bad ones. So...Since microbes are here to stay and are an integral part of us, we need to make peace with that and start acknowledging them as such.  Have you tried talking to the microbes in your belly button?

Scary can take many forms, so here is a scary ending note: one of the microbes historically commonly found in breast milk and the gut of babies is becoming rarer and rarer and we don’t know why.

The Evolutionary Hologenomics Podcast turns one!

In this special anniversary episode, we catch up with Professor Tom Gilbert, director of the Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics.
We start with a trip down memory lane, to ten years ago when the idea for the centre first came up, the application process, the rejection, and finally the acceptance of the second application.

Now 2 years in, the centre is beaming with activity and excitement, and its short but impressive existence has so far allowed for the creation of faculty positions, many internal and external collaborations, lots of grants, big and small, including 3 Horizon 2020, many publications, a podcast and all the usual social media channels and an applied hologenomics conference in Bilbao in September!

The future looks equally bright, with the expansion into new fields, such as human and plant biology, phages, gene editing and organ-on-a-chip.

In this episode, we chat with PhD student Jacob Agerbo Rasmussen about his research in salmonids and their microbiome. Since Jacob had two papers published recently, we decided to switch up the format of the podcast a bit and make it like a journal club.
We start by introducing the structure of a scientific research paper, and then dive into Jacob’s papers, which focus on the effect of food additives (probiotics and synbiotics) on the gut microbiome of rainbow trout and how that affects either health or disease.

In this episode, we chat with Jaelle Brealey about salmon microbiome and macrobiome. We discuss salmon health and zoom in and out of different compartments to see what bacteria are in the salmon gut, as well as in tapeworms that live in the salmon. Think Matryoshka dolls! Yes, tapeworms don’t have an intestine but they have their own microbiome! Now that the can of worms is open, we have the foundation to answer many other questions that are important for both basic science, as well as applied science, especially related to health.

In this episode, we chat with Raphael Eisenhofer about all things marsupial! From evolution, to the joys of field work to some pretty cool molecular biology research on pouch microbiome. Raphael has been doing this amazing work for the past two years and now he joins CEH to work on Convergence Hologenomics.

In this episode, we catch up with associate professor Antton Alberdi and get an overview of what it takes to write such a monumental project application, as well as what the project is actually about. Lots of teamwork and interdisciplinarity, from trial design, to collecting biological samples of host and their gut microbiome, processing them in many ways to obtain a variety of data types, to the actual bioinformatics data analysis. This is a very ambitious but also fun and collaborative project, and guess what? They are looking for motivated and talented postdocs to join their team! If you are interested, or just want to follow the progress of the project, make sure you check them out at www.3domics.eu and follow them on the various social media platforms (info can be found on their website).

We had a chat with our very first guest, Aoife Leonard, who told us about her ambitious project called Earth Hologenome Initiative.
She is busy managing the project and preparing very cool sampling kits to send out to collaborators collecting samples around the globe.
The idea is to collect samples in the field, all over the world, from animals and their microbes, and send the kit back for sample processing and genomic data generation.
Then, these data can be used in a very powerful way together with any other data collaborators might be collecting, from ecology to behaviour, adaptations, and evolution.

Check out and follow the project here:
On Twitter: @AoifeLeonard1 and @EHologenome
By e-mail: [email protected]
EHI website: www.earthhologenome.org

Intro and outro music credits:
Hopeful Journey
by Scott Holmes Music
(Music is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License)