Profile
Project title: The role of beneficial microbes in Insect Adaptation
Summary: Exploring multiple factors to explain the diversity and distribution of bacterial symbionts of aphids. A large part of the project will be looking at recent and past co-evolution between aphids and a defensive symbiont, which will involve cross-infection experiments to infer costs of infection and host ranges and co-phylogenetic analysis to examine co-diversification and transfer events. The project will also examine symbiont:parasite co-evolution to explain symbiont distribution.