Symbiotic associations shape all organisms on Earth, and the core research interests in our lab are to understand how antagonistic (parasitic) and beneficial (mutualistic) microbial symbionts shape host ecology and evolution; how complementary partnerships evolve and are stable over millions of years of evolutionary time; and how sustainable defences against exploitation of host-symbiont associations evolve. We integrate a range of approaches including field studies, behavioural observations, microbial isolations, molecular biology, (meta)genomics, and metabolomics to address these questions.