Welcome to The Bordenstein Laboratory!

We have broad interests in microbial-host interactions and the relative importance of genes vs. bacterial symbionts in the evolution of Life, including:

• How do genes and symbionts affect the formation of new species?
• How often and what kinds of genes are swapped between intracellular coinfections?
• How do animal genes regulate and coordinate their bacterial symbionts to shape the laws of their complex, interacting society?

News & Events

* May 2012 - New blog post on The Science of a Superorganism - Seth's article in the popular science magazine Bare Essentials.

* April 2012 - New blog post on the story behind our new review Speciation by Symbiosis at Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Preprint.

* March 2012 - The National Science Foundation's Dimensions of Biodiversity Abstract Book has been cleared for release and highlights our infectious speciation work on pages 30-31. You can find a pdf of this document here.

* February 2012 - Scientific American (March 2012) features work on the symbiotic basis of speciation, in part by Rob and Seth - "Gut Microbes May Drive Evolution". The two articles discussed from our lab are here and here.

* January 2012 - New article published in Evolution that demonstrates the host microbiota relationshps between species parallel the host's phylogeny. Implications of the microbiota in eukaryotic speciation are discussed. The roles of host evolutionary relationships and development in structuring microbial communities.