New Book: Cellular Dialogues in the Holobiont
CRC 1182-speaker Thomas Bosch recently edited the book “Cellular Dialogues in the Holobiont” (CRC press) together with Mike Hadfield from the University of Hawaii. The book addresses many of the themes investigated in the CRC1182 and contains contributions from CRC members including Ute Hentschel, Sebastian Fraune, Hinrich Schulenburg, Eva Stukenbrock, and Thomas Bosch. SAB members Karen Guillemin and Margaret McFall-Ngai also have contributed to this book. Here’s the preface:
A dialogue that matters: microbe–host interactions in protists, plants, and animals.
Animal evolution appears intimately linked to the presence of microbes. A continuously increasing number of studies demonstrate that individuals from sponges to humans are not solitary, isolated entities, but consist of complex communities of many species that likely coevolved during a billion years of coexistence (McFall-Ngai et al., 2013). This progress is due in large part to the application of “metagenomic” methods: a series of experimental and computational approaches that allows a microbial community’s composition to be defined by DNA sequencing without having to culture its members. This work has yielded catalogues of microbial species, many previously unknown and belonging to all three domains of life, as well as lists of millions of microbial genes collectively known as a host’s microbiome. Research on host–microbe interactions has become an emerging cross-disciplinary field.Contrary to the classical view that microbes are primarily pathogenic and disease-causing, there is now a multitude of studies indicating that a host-specific microbiome provides functions related to metabolism, immunity, development, and environmental adaptation to its animal, plant, or fungal host. Similarly, microbes have been documented as important for environmental sensing, inducing colony formation and sexual reproduction in choanoflagellates, and contributing to developmental transitions and life history traits such as development pace and longevity. Similarly, the microbiome of plants impacts the phenotype and fitness of the plant host. It has become increasingly clear that animals, plants, and fungi evolved in a microbial world and that multicellular organisms rely on their associated microbes to function. Symbiosis appears as a general principle in eukaryotic evolution (Douglas, 2014).
