On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Many animal and plant species harbour microbes in their microbiota that protect them from parasite infection. These ‘protective microbes’ can be a significant component of host defence. Using experimental evolution of a novel, tripartite interaction, my group has demonstrated that a costly bacterium living in worms can rapidly evolve to defend their animal hosts against infection by virulent parasites, thus crossing the parasitism-mutualism continuum. We also show that these protective microbes can drive major changes in host tolerance, parasite virulence and coevolutionary dynamics. Our results indicate that the host microbiome is important in shaping infection outcomes, now and over evolutionary time.
