Project MetaBear

February 2025 marks the commencement of Project MetaBear after being awarded an

MSCA European Postdoctoral Fellowship back in February 2024! I am working closely with the wonderful Dr Katerina Guschanksi to explore how the relationship between animal hosts and their symbiotic microbiome change during population declines. We hypothesise that a breakdown or shift in oral microbiome communities is linked to decreasing genetic diversity in the host, culminating to increased disease prevalence in declining animal populations. We are using museum specimens to study this effect over the last 200 years in a wild population of Scandinavian brown bears.

This is my first foray into the field of ancient metagenomics, which began with two weeks of scraping dental plaque off old teeth at the Naturhistoriska riksmuseet (NRM) Stockholm. Though my poor hand may never recover, we successfully sampled 200 years worth of specimens from multiple species that we endeavour to analyse within the scope of a broader NERC project. Stay tuned for updates on this exciting new chapter in the life of an under-caffeinated postdoc from down under.