In 2025 we have enjoyed the addition of multiple postdocs, in addition to another good cohort of masters and undergrad students. Lots of data on parasites, toxicity, microbiomes, wheat and bees! Unfortunately Grace and Andra missed the meal out and photo

This week members of the Leverhulme Center for the Holobiont have been invited to the Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics in Copenhagen. Such a wonderful meeting learning about the incredible science taking place. A pretty fantastic view of Copenhagen from the venue too!

Nice to catch up with everyone at the IUSSI conference in London today. A good representation from the lab too with Miles, Charlotte and Monika presenting excellent student posters (Charlotte winning the IUSSI 1st Prize)! – I think it’s also safe to say my phone camera has seen better days!

Students from the Living Planet with Ecological Applications MSc course finished their pollination week with Dr Peter Graystock with a practical of extracting honey from Silwood Park’s honey bee hives. This is always such a fun day!

Today we welcome Charlotte Fryday and Vida Svahnstrom to the group.

Charlotte is actually re-joining after carrying out a sucesfull masters project in the lab in 2022/23. She is part of the Leverhulme center for the holobiont and will be evolving bee associated microbiomes using different systems.

Vida is a on a NERC SSCP DTP and is continuing her work with Kew Gardens, exploring the speciation of epiphytes.

2024 has been a fun year so far, exploring soil microbiomes, fluorescent wasps, bees, wheat, parasites, thermal performance and toxicity.

Left to right: Haitian, Jingy, Pin, Miles, Peter, Monika, Joely, Temea, Loveline, Emma, Jack)

Today we publish work from data originally collected some years ago but provides a fascinating insight into the fungal diversity found within bumblebee colonies. Samples of various substrates from within 14 bumblebee colonies, including the honey, honey cup wall, egg cup wall, and frass were placed on agar and any fungi present that grew was isolated and sequenced.

Overall, we cultured 11 fungal species from the various nest substrates. These included both pathogenic and non-pathogenic fungi, such as Aspergillus sp., Penicillium sp., and Candida sp. Our results provide the first insights into the diversity of viable fungal communities in commercial bumblebee nests.

Miles Nesbit, explained the findings with a PeerJ spotlight (embedded below), and a direct link to the research is here.

Take-all disease is one of the most destructive root diseases of wheat crops. Caused by infection with the fungi Gaeumannomyces graminis var. tritici, the disease kills the plants and can remain in soils over successive years if careful treatment and management is not applied.

Over the next 3 years, the labs of Bonnie Waring, Peter Graystock, Tom Bell, Samraat Pawar and Emma Ransome will employ 5 Postdocs and 2 technicians to explore the underlying wheat-microbe interactions that are influencing disease and crop yield. The project will then go on to explore manipulative techniques to better harness the microbial communities to improve crop health and yield. In addition to this applied impact, we will also explore the creation of a ‘digital microbiome’ to predict changes and impacts of microbiome manipulations.

More information can be found here: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/248639/245-million-gift-launches-novel-research/

This summer the lab bought some new digital dissection scopes and digital phase contrast microscopes to help us catalogue what we are seeing. Here you can see a few of the microbes we commonly find inside wild bumblebees – the moving microbes are a common parasite called Crithidia (a genus of trypanasomatids)

Our annual Silwood outreach day: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/georgina-mace-living-planet/events/bugsday/

Its been a great couple of days at the RES student forum. Lab PhD student Monika presented some of her data on parasites in pollinator communities and throughout there was a wonderful range of talks and some very exciting research!

This year the lab will be without Pete for a few weeks whilst on Paternity leave, so the new students are getting upto speed as fast as possible on an array of projects!

We have Naomi, Kat and Maggie running their undergraduate final year projects on microbial growth, parasite spread, and bumblebee nest architecture respectively.

From the Silwood Masters streams we have Xiao, Logan, Noel and Charlotte who are working on Honeybee stressors, directed evolution, bumblebee invitro rearing, and parasite transmission respectively.

Learn more about their projects from our group page!

The lab has a new toy and its magnificent! Today we played with the labs new 3D scanner and scanned in some bumblebee nests which are complex shapes but could tell us alot about the age, health and reproductive fitness of the colony!

Today we officially launched the opening of the Leverhulme center for the Holobiont. With £10 million funding from the Leverhulme trust, the center will explore how microbes interact with their hosts across the tree of life.

Based at Imperial College London the center includes an incredible range of partners such as the  Wellcome Sanger Institute; the EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI); the Natural History Museum; the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew; CABI; the Rosalind Franklin Institute; the Mary Lyon Centre; ZSL London Zoo and the Tara Oceans Consortium.

The research at the center will consist of 4 main themes (challenges). Challenge 1: the holobiont tree of Life – will look at microbial-host interactions across a diversity of species and environments providing baseline data. Challenge 2: Crafting the holobiont – will explore synthetic methods to create new host-microbe interactions and improve holobiont health. Challenge 3: Holobiont rescue – will identify current emergencies that could be solved with microbial intervention. Challenge 4: Holobiont Green Revolution – will explore ways to improve crop health and yields using microbial interventions.

More information here: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/241454/imperial-partners-launch-leverhulme-centre-holobiont/

A PhD as part of the NERC Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet DTP is available in my group. The PhD will explore the evidence and impact of parasite spillover across pollinator communities with the aim of improving our understanding of disease dynamics and helping to inform policy.

Full details of the PhD called “Evidence and impact of parasite spillover across pollinator communities” can be found here: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/grantham-institute/public/dtp/2023-projects/2023_53_DoLS_Graystock.pdf

Details of applying for the PhD can be found here: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/grantham/education/science-and-solutions-for-a-changing-planet-dtp/studentship-opportunities/

The application deadline is 12 midday on Jan 6th 2023. Please do not hesitate to ask me any questions relating to this PhD.

This week has been the 2022 FrEECS conference and all masters students did an excellent job with their presentations!

From the lab we had;

Dylan Asbury – The impacts of two pesticides on the parasite load and colony growth of Bombus terrestris
Sofia Riccomagno – Microbes in flowers and their role in pollination networks
Paul Cabrisy – Evaluating the ability of deep learning models to track markerless bumblebees
Congjia Chen – Microbial associations and inferred interactions in wild bumble bees
Tash Ramsden – Genomic Signals of Selection in three UK Bumblebees
Carlota Berbel Torres – Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) resilience to exposure of pesticides and microbiota manipulation

Congratulations! Just the vivas to go!

Ryans Mres explored the population genetics of bumblebees in the UK and here he presents his findings at the 55th Population Genetics Group (popgroup) conference. Despite the nerves, Ryan did a great job presenting at his first conference and a recording is available to view here;