We live in a microbial world, where our health and wellbeing are intimately connected to the collective functions of microbial communities that live within us and in the environments that impact us. Our lab aims to pioneer technologies required to both understand and engineer microbial communities for the betterment of our society and our planet. Specifically, we are focused on the development of new genetic tools to perform efficient targeted genome editing directly within microbial communities and across the bacterial tree of life.