Dr. Ruth Ley is Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen and Director of the Department of Microbiome Science. Dr. Sara Clasen is a postdoctoral fellow in the same lab. Together, they're interested in the co-evolution of humans with their microbiomes. They use basic science to investigate the evolutionary history of gut microbes, how they have adapted to life inside humans, and how they affect human biology and health. More recently, they published a pre-print on the silent recognition of flagellins from human gut commensal bacteria by TLR5.