Margaret McFall-Ngai first laid eyes on the native Hawaiian bobtail squid nearly three decades ago. It has been a passion for her ever since.

With big eyes and a tail that flares like a ti-leaf skirt, the little creature has offered more than charm to the scientific community. It has helped illuminate how animals and their microbes interact. That has become a hot topic in science, one in which the University of Hawaii at Manoa is poised to play a big role.

The recent advent of inexpensive genetic sequencing threw open a window into the world of microbes, allowing scientists to identify them and start to tease out their relationships with plants, animals, soils, oceans and ecosystems.

“There has been a hands-down revolution in biology because of this,” said McFall-Ngai, director of the University of Hawaii Pacific Biosciences Research Center. “We now know that microbes are the base of health of every living system on Earth. They are the most diverse organisms, and they are the most important organisms. This is a world that we could not know until we had these molecular tools, and it’s like, whoa!”

The squid offered some early lessons. McFall-Ngai and her colleagues have studied the symbiotic relationship between the squid and a single species of bacteria, known as vibrio, which affects the development of the squid’s tissues, immune system and its ability to glow at night.

The professor sees the microbial world as a driving force in creating and in solving problems in human health and the environment.

The federal government launched a National Microbiome Initiative last year to focus on the communities of microorganisms that live on people, plants, animals, soils, oceans and the atmosphere. In recent years, UH-Manoa has built its capacity in the field and now boasts three members of the National Academy of Sciences who focus on microbiome research, among its cadre of specialists.

There are botanists studying plant-fungi interactions, biologists examining the microbiome of mosquitoes that carry dengue, oceanographers tracking the influence of microbes, and others researching the Earth’s biome.

“The University of Hawaii, I feel, is poised to do something that no other place can do, and that is to study how the environment that we live in influences human health,” McFall-Ngai said. “We are hands down the most diverse environment on Earth.”