This

book examines how the growing knowledge of the huge range of animal-bacterial

interactions, whether in shared ecosystems or intimate symbioses, is

fundamentally altering our understanding of animal biology. Individuals from

simple invertebrates to human are not solitary, homogenous entities but consist

of complex communities of many species that likely evolved during a billion

years of coexistence. Defining the individual microbe-host conversations in

these consortia, is a challenging but necessary step on the path to

understanding the function of the associations as a whole. The hologenome

theory of evolution considers the holobiont with its hologenome as a unit of

selection in evolution. This new view may have profound impact on understanding

a strictly microbe/symbiont-dependent life style and its evolutionary

consequences. It may also affect the way how we approach complex environmental

diseases from corals (coral bleaching) to human (inflammatory bowel disease

etc). The book is written for scientists as well as medically interested

persons in the field of immunobiology, microbiology, evolutionary biology,

evolutionary medicine and corals.