ABOVE: MODIFIED FROM © ISTOCK.COM; THE SCIENTIST STAFF
It is widely accepted that all animals and plants host diverse microbial communities that are vitally important for their functioning and survival. In many cases, these microbiomes can be at least partially heritable, being passed from parent to offspring. Thus, when environmental changes occur, we would expect to see alterations not only in hosts’ physiology over subsequent generations, but also in their microbiomes.
Husband-and-wife team Eugene Rosenberg and Ilana Zilber-Rosenberg of Tel Aviv University in Israel proposed this concept a decade ago (FEMS Microbiol Rev, 32:723–35, 2008). A host organism and its resident microbes—the so-called holobiont—functions as a whole on multiple levels, they argued, from the gene and chromosome to the organism’s anatomy and physiology, and acts as an independent unit of selection.
A famous example of this concept is the relationship between corals and their symbionts, the zooxanthellae. Researchers have demonstrated ...
