Holobiont: is the whole more than the sum of its parts?
No Thumbnail Available
Permanent Link
Author/Creator ORCID
Date
Type of Work
Department
Program
Citation of Original Publication
Javan, Gulnaz T Finley, Sheree J. Erill, Ivan Ascunce, Marina S. Goulet, Tamar L., Holobiont: is the whole more than the sum of its parts?, https://reintegratingbiology.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Is-the-Whole-More-Than-the-Sum-of-Its-Parts-Ivan-Erill.pdf
Rights
This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author.
Abstract
Biology has traditionally operated on the organism as the natural unit for understanding life and evolution. Advances in sequencing technologies have recently made it possible to uncover the contribution of multiple organisms and mobile genetic elements to the operation of conventional “organisms.” This dawning realization has led to a reconceptualization of the organism as a community of multiple interacting partners, often referred to as the holobiont. Recasting organisms as holobionts has the advantage of bringing to the forefront the myriad contributions of the diverse entities making up the holobiont, but also puts forward new challenges that need to be addressed to make this reconceptualization applicable to modern biology. Here we provide an operational definition of the holobiont and use it to address the evolutionary processes driving the formation and maintenance of these compound entities. We discuss the main challenges that need to be faced in order to make the holobiont stance a useful paradigm across multiple scales and fields in biology