Foundations of our laboratory’s approach

So if we drop a mouse in a blender, we get more ‘bacterial’ than ‘mouse’ genomes. By a factor of nearly a hundred! This is the new wisdom. But it’s wrong. We definitely get more ‘microbiont’ than ‘macrobiont’ genomes. But the mouse is not the macrobiome. The mouse is the sum of these genomes – the holobiont expressing the hologenome – and it is that sum that contributes to the success of the mouse under evolutionary selection.

– Richard Jefferson

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

– Theodosius Dobzhansky

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

– Charles Darwin