Michael Sieber, Lucía Pita, Nancy Weiland-Bräuer, Philipp Dirksen, Jun Wang, Benedikt Mortzfeld, Sören Franzenburg, Ruth A Schmitz, John F Baines, Sebastian Fraune, Ute Hentschel, Hinrich Schulenburg, Thomas C G Bosch, Arne Traulsen
Almost all animals and plants are inhabited by diverse communities of microorganisms, the microbiota, thereby forming an integrated entity, the metaorganism. Natural selection should favor hosts that shape the community composition of these microbes to promote a beneficial host-microbe symbiosis. Indeed, animal hosts often pose selective environments, which only a subset of the environmentally available microbes are able to colonize. How these microbes assemble after colonization to form the complex microbiota is less clear...
June 2019: PLoS Biology