Guy Jacobs is a geneticist studying human and microbiome variation, primarily in Indonesia and India. He uses genetic data, modelling and simulation to better understand human history, including genetic adaptation and archaic introgression. Interests in how large-scale patterns of genetic variation, over countries and continents, are impacted by more local processes such as kinship practices, social interactions, and migration and movement decisions has drawn him to the microbiome as a dynamic window into host behaviour.
Guy received his PhD in Complex Systems Simulation from the University of Southampton. He then did postdoctoral work under the supervision of anthropologist J. Stephen Lansing at the Complexity Institute in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is currently an Associate Professor in Human Evolutionary Genetics and Bioinformatics at the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge.
From hosts to microbes: a genomic lens across social networks, lifestyle and history in rural Indonesia
Population genomics is a powerful tool to understand the evolutionary processes structuring genetic diversity. In particular, it has provided rich insights into our species’ history over deep time. But genomics can also offer a tool to investigate diversity at finer time-scales – shorter than human generations when we include the microbes that we carry. In this talk, I will present our current work in Indonesia, where we study the relationship between hosts and their microbes over a hunter-gatherer lifestyle-transition cline. Using over 1000 metagenomic samples from people and dogs spanning multiple body sites we assemble >34,000 metagenome-assembled genomes representing over 5,000 species-level bins. We identify considerable village-scale microbiome divergence, partially associated with lifestyle shifts; find considerable host- and body-site species sharing; and detect clear signals of strain transmission through host social behaviour. Finally, human genomes enable us to assess links between host relationships and demography and microbial variation. Together, this work offers a multi-species population genomic perspective on the evolutionary and behavioural forces structuring broad biological diversity at the scale of human communities.