The Holobiont Imperative

Thisbook examines how the growing knowledge of the huge range of animal-bacterialinteractions, whether in shared ecosystems or intimate symbioses, isfundamentally altering our understanding of animal biology. Individuals fromsimple invertebrates to human are not solitary, homogenous entities but consistof complex communities of many species that likely evolved during a billionyears of coexistence. Defining the individual microbe-host conversations inthese consortia, is a challenging but necessar