Year: 2022

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend and concludes this weekend on a lively article about metabolic cycles as functional units of selection in microorganisms, not species as the unit. This radical, imaginative suggestion is potentially a paradigm breaker. https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

NEW THINKING. “In biofilm philosophizing there is also a move to see collectives as real and evolutionarily cohesive even though collective (vertical) reproduction can be supplemented (sometimes 100 %) by (horizontal) recruitment.” (The slime philosophers). https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

COMMUNITY ORGANISMS. “Ereshefsky and his colleagues have been especially active in promoting multi-species biofilms as organism-like evolutionary individuals, endorsing a relaxation of some traditional requirements for collective reproduction.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

DEFINITIONAL CHANGES. “What we see happening, then, is an attempt to preserve the interest in and momentum of holobiont and biofilm research by relinquishing the necessity of collective reproduction (and thus the status as ‘‘major transitions’’ in evolution in Maynard Smith’s and Szathmary’s sense).” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

ENTWINED COLLECTIVES. “In their place we are offered assertions about how often it is that macrobes and microbes occur together (as ‘‘incontrovertible realities’’) in nature—a surprise only to nonmicrobiologists—or attempts to recast them as interactors at the collective cellular level.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

FUNCTIONAL COLLECTIVES. “The hypothesis that there is a core human gut microbiome, definable by a set of abundant microbial organismal lineages that we all share, may be incorrect... Instead, it appears that a core gut microbiome exists at the level of metabolic functions.”(Turnbaugh et al.) https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

FUNCTIONAL ISLANDS. “This conservation suggests a high degree of redundancy in the gut microbiome and supports an ecological view of each individual as an ‘island’ inhabited by unique collections of microbial phylotypes: as in actual islands, different species assemblages converge on shared core functions provided by distinctive components.” (Turnbaugh et al.) https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

THE REFRAIN. “The players may change but the game remains’’—expresses exactly the same sentiment we articulate as ‘‘It’s the song, not the singer(s)’’ in the ideas presented here.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

FUNCTIONAL COMMUNITIES. “Functional metabolic processes uncoupled from taxonomy (at least at a fine scale) are found not only in microbiomes inside the intestines of macrobes (holobionts) but also in microbial communities in decaying dead whales at the bottom of the sea, on our teeth, comprising plant mycorrhizae, and at a host of other natural and human-made sites.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

FUNCTIONAL CLASSIFICATIONS. “These authors suggest that an appropriately ecological microbial classification would recognize functional ‘‘guilds,’’ phylogenetically heterogeneous groups defined only by their possession of one or more biochemical capacities.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn