Follow-up of the First International Conference on Holobionts
(Paris, April 19-21, 2017)
It is becoming increasingly clear that the development, nutrition, physiology and health of most macro-organisms are influenced by the complex microbial communities they host, that shape their ecology and evolution. Biology is indeed undergoing a paradigm shift, where individual phenotypes are seen as a result of the combined expression of the host and associated microbe genomes, leading to the popularization of notions of the holobiont (the host and its microbiota) and the hologenome (the collective genomes of a holobiont). Holobiont research is now an imperative across numerous fields of the life and medical sciences, including aspects of (bio)informatics. This pushed the scientific community to organize the first International Conference on Holobionts in Paris, April 19-21, 2017.
In this special series in Microbiome, we highlight articles that show, use or debate the concept of holobiont to approach taxonomically and ecologically diverse organisms, from humans and plants, to sponges and insects.
Guest editors:
Julian Marchesi (Imperial College London)
Christophe Mougel (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique)
Marc-André Selosse (Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle Paris ; University of Gdansk)
Jean-Christophe Simon (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique)