This will be the first Gordon Research Conference on Animal-Microbe Symbioses. Animals are intimately associated with a complex community of beneficial microbes that are essential for their development, nutrition, and health. Research on animal-microbe symbioses has recently become highly active, after decades at the margins of mainstream biology. This renaissance has come from the application of major advances in both methods for studying uncultivable organisms such as molecular biological techniques (e.g., the ‘omics’) and imaging methods that can combine information about identity and function at the single-cell level. These and other new approaches are providing novel and unexpected insights into the biology, ecology, and evolution of mutualistic associations between animals and their microbiota. This GRC was created with the goal of providing a stimulating, interdisciplinary and international forum for understanding the current state of knowledge, discussing the newest research directions, debating key questions, and identifying unresolved issues in the field of beneficial associations between microbes and animals. We aim to bring together researchers from a wide range of invertebrate and vertebrate systems, and to showcase the newest technological advances in bioinformatics, sequencing, modeling and imaging approaches. This meeting will be broad enough to include participation by scientists in allied fields such as plant symbioses and pathogenic microbiology, whose unique perspectives will not only expand our knowledge, but also develop new ideas and reveal parallels within our concepts of host-microbe interactions. We encourage and support student and postdoctoral attendance, and will choose outstanding abstracts from young researchers to be showcased in short oral presentations throughout the program.