Biology of Species Interactions

Interactions between species, whether beneficial or harmful, are ubiquitous in nature.

These interactions may include two players (e.g., a host and its bacterial symbiont), multiple players (e.g., butterflies, their larval food plants, and protozoan parasites), or an entire community (e.g., plant-pollinator networks at the landscape scale, microbes within a microbiome).

Emory faculty in this field utilize rigorous experimental frameworks to dissect the environmental context-dependency and spatiotemporal dynamics of these relationships. By integrating genetic and genomic methodologies, they characterize the population structure, molecular pathways, and phenotypic variation that mediate species coexistence.

Principal investigators aim to elucidate how these interactions govern coevolutionary trajectories and population stability, ultimately applying this fundamental biological knowledge to critical challenges in conservation biology and ecosystem management.