Kent Hatch
New College of Florida, FL·Ecology & Evolution
Many sea animals, such as sponges, carry communities of microbes, known as microbiomes. Some hosts carry only one or two kinds of microbes, while others carry thousands.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Microbiology & Immunology
Biology
- Topics
microbiome
host-microbe interactions
symbiosis
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Test the relative importance of environmental filtering, host selection, spatial connectivity, microbial competition, cospeciation and host switching in shaping marine invertebrate microbiomes, using models from evolutionary and metacommunity ecology.
- Use phylogenetic comparative methods, which compare traits across evolutionary trees, to test whether different host and symbiont groups respond differently to the forces that shape microbiomes.
- Track how attached sea invertebrate communities and their microbiomes assemble over time, using a replicated series of settlement structures placed in the field.
- Compare microbiome divergence in marine sponges that speciated apart (allopatry) with those that speciated in the same place (sympatry), and develop software for large-scale analysis of DNA sequence archives.
More about the research
Why does a given microbe end up living in a given host? Does the variety of hosts drive the variety of their microbes? And how do these partnerships change over evolutionary time? Answers to these questions help reveal the general rules that govern how hosts and microbes live together.
Why it matters
This is basic science on the rules that govern partnerships between hosts and microbes. It shows how microbial communities in sea animals form and evolve, and how those communities relate to the diversity of their hosts. The results could eventually inform how scientists think about microbiomes in sustaining marine biodiversity.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Ecology & Evolution
Isolate and formally describe hundreds of new Pucciniomycotina yeasts from Hawaiian plant, animal and environmental samples and from zoo animals, using genome sequencing, physiological data and culture traits.
Adam Reitzel
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC·Ecology & Evolution
Measure the extent of copy number variation in key immune genes across Nematostella vectensis populations using comparative genomics and transcriptomics.
Sarah Sheffield
Binghamton University, NY·Ecology & Evolution
Test how ancient climate events affected heterochrony, meaning shifts in developmental timing, in Paleozoic echinoderms, using phylogenetic trees built from museum, database and literature data.
The school
New College of Florida: 1 labs on PI Pages.
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