Sarah Knowles

It is now clear that most animals carry a dense and diverse community of symbiotic microbes – their microbiome - which can be critical for host biology. Nowhere are these communities more dense than in mammals, and the human microbiome has received intense focus in recent years. However, the microbiome of wild animals remains largely unexplored, leaving open many questions about whether findings from studies in humans and laboratory animals are relevant in more natural settings. My research focusses on the mammalian microbiome in the wild. Using wild mice and other rodents as model systems, my group studies both what shapes the microbiome in natural settings but also how it impacts the host. We do this by combining field studies, experiments, computational and comparative approaches.