The Centre, which has been awarded £10m in funding over ten years by the Leverhulme Trust, is led by a network of researchers across Imperial College London and includes partners at the Wellcome Sanger Institute; the EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI); the Natural History Museum; Royal Botanic Gardens Kew; CABI; the Rosalind Franklin Institute; the Mary Lyon Centre; ZSL London Zoo, and the Tara Oceans Consortium.
‘Holobiont’ is a term given to a larger organism, such as a human, animal or plant, and its associated community of microbes. Many of these microbial communities, often called ‘microbiomes’, are relied upon by the host organism, for example the ‘good bacteria’ that live in our guts and keep us healthy.
Professor Thomas Bell, from the Department of Life Sciences (Silwood Park) at Imperial and director of the new centre, said: “There is growing recognition that microbes are essential for life, including providing protection against...