The Leverhulme Centre for the Holobiont is a multidisciplinary research centre led by Professor Thomas Bell at Imperial College London. The Centre was established to advance a new understanding of life based on the concept of the holobiont: the idea that plants, animals and other multicellular organisms should be viewed together with their associated microbial communities as integrated biological units.
By bringing together expertise from ecology, evolution, microbiology, plant science, zoology, conservation biology, bioengineering, metabolomics, genomics and bioinformatics, the Centre seeks to understand how host-microbe partnerships originate, evolve, respond to environmental change and can be engineered to address global challenges. These challenges include biodiversity loss, emerging wildlife diseases, ecosystem restoration and sustainable agriculture.
A defining feature of the Centre is its breadth. Researchers investigate holobiont relationships across the Tree of Life, from plants, fungi and lichens to insects, amphibians, fish, corals and humans. This comparative approach enables the Centre to identify the fundamental principles that govern host-microbe interactions across diverse organisms and environments.
The Centre’s research combines three complementary strengths: world-leading biological collections, cutting-edge omics technologies, and innovative experimental approaches. Together, these resources provide an unprecedented platform for understanding how microbial partnerships shape life on Earth and how they can be harnessed to tackle some of society’s most pressing challenges.
As the Centre’s hub institution, Imperial provides expertise spanning microbial ecology, conservation biology, plant sciences, metabolomics, synthetic biology, systems biology and bioengineering. Researchers at Imperial lead work across a wide range of holobiont systems while developing new technologies, including synthetic biology tools and “holobiont-on-a-chip” platforms, for studying and engineering host-microbe interactions.
Kew contributes one of the world’s most significant collections of plants and fungi, including living collections, herbarium and fungarium specimens, and the Millennium Seed Bank. These resources provide unique opportunities to investigate plant and fungal holobionts across geographic, ecological and evolutionary scales.
Home to one of the world’s largest natural history collections, the NHM enables researchers to explore host-microbe relationships through time using historical specimens. Its expertise in biodiversity, systematics and evolutionary biology helps place modern holobiont interactions into a broader evolutionary context.
ZSL supports research into wildlife-associated microbiomes through its expertise in conservation science and access to living and archival collections. The partnership is particularly important for work on emerging diseases, species recovery and the conservation of threatened wildlife.
CABI houses the UK’s National Fungus Collection and Crop Microbiome Cryobank, providing expertise in fungal biology, microbiome preservation and agricultural innovation. Its resources support research into plant health, crop-associated microbiomes and sustainable agricultural solutions.
The Wellcome Sanger Institute contributes world-leading expertise in biodiversity genomics through initiatives including the Tree of Life Programme. These resources enable large-scale exploration of host and microbial genomes across an extraordinary range of species.
EMBL-EBI provides internationally recognised bioinformatics infrastructure and microbiome data resources. Its expertise supports the analysis, integration and long-term accessibility of the large and complex datasets generated across the Centre.
The Rosalind Franklin Institute contributes cutting-edge imaging and functional omics technologies, helping researchers visualise and characterise interactions between hosts and microbes at molecular and cellular scales.
The Mary Lyon Centre provides advanced gnotobiotic and controlled-environment facilities, enabling experiments with sterile organisms and precisely defined microbiomes. These facilities are essential for understanding how microbial communities influence host biology.
The Tara Oceans Consortium contributes globally significant marine biodiversity and microbiome datasets collected from expeditions across the world’s oceans. These resources allow the Centre to investigate holobiont relationships in marine environments and compare them with those found in terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems.