Sponges and corals have complex relationships with microorganisms, which in many cases are indispensable for survival of their hosts. Building on complementary expertise of the Rodrigo lab in computational evolutionary biology and the Adamska lab in marine genomics, this project aims to develop and test ecological and evolutionary models of microbiomes across sponge and coral species. The computational models will incorporate ecological and evolutionary factors that operate in sponge and coral microbiomes and will be tested by field- and lab-based experiments.