Microbial Neighbours

Within the Microbial Environments team of the HBBE we are interested in the millions of microorganisms we share our everyday habitats with. These microbes include complex communities of bacteria, fungi and viruses You might be surprised to find out that in just a teaspoon of soil there are estimated to be over 1,000,000,000 microbes – that’s more than there are people living in Africa. Even more fascinating is that our own bodies are so covered in these fascinating microbes that they almost outnumber the human cells that actually make us, us. Indeed, each time we visit the toilet we can swing from majority microbes to majority human! 

All the microbes within a given system serve a purpose, from fixing nitrogen in soils to degrading waste and helping us produce or digest our food. Much like any ecosystem, regular and repeated interference can disrupt these delicate networks resulting in breakdown of the communities our microbial neighbours inhabit. 

Using environmental sampling and DNA sequencing techniques the Microbial Environments team is keen to explore how human interventions can influence these microbial environments and potentially identify which individuals or groups of our microbial neighbours might confer different useful properties that we can utilise in the living and working spaces of the future.