Abstract
Animals are home to complex microbial communities, which are shaped through interactions within the community, interactions with the host, and through environmental factors. The advent of high-throughput sequencing methods has led to novel insights in changing patterns of community composition and structure. However, deciphering the different types of interactions among community members, with their hosts and their interplay with their environment is still a challenge of major proportion. The emerging fields of synthetic microbial ecology and community systems biology have the potential to decrypt these complex relationships. Studying host-associated microbiota across multiple spatial and temporal scales will bridge the gap between individual microorganism studies and large-scale whole community surveys. Here, we discuss the unique potential of Hydra as an emerging experimental model in microbiome research. Through in vivo, in vitro, and in silico approaches the interaction structure of host-associated microbial communities and the effects of the host on the microbiota and its interactions can be disentangled. Research in the model system Hydra can unify disciplines from molecular genetics to ecology, opening up the opportunity to discover fundamental rules that govern microbiome community stability.
Highlights
Microbes sustain life on this planet as they perform important ecosystem functions and inhabit all organisms
Cooperative interactions among community members were predicted to be the major driving force for a productive and stable microbiome, e.g., in the human gut (Bäckhed et al, 2005; Van den Abbeele et al, 2011). This view was challenged by a seminal study that integrated ecological network analysis and recent data from mammalian microbiomes (Coyte et al, 2015)
We here propose to extend the utilization of the metaorganism Hydra beyond the fields of developmental biology (Bosch, 2007), stem cell research (Bosch, 2009; Bosch et al, 2010), immunity (Bosch, 2013, 2014), aging (Nebel and Bosch, 2012; Boehm et al, 2013), and animal–microbe interactions (Bosch, 2013, 2014) as a model organism for studying interactions within the animalassociated microbiota and on how that affects the host and vice versa (Figure 1)
Summary
Interactions: The Potential of the Metaorganism Hydra as an Experimental Model. Animals are home to complex microbial communities, which are shaped through interactions within the community, interactions with the host, and through environmental factors. The emerging fields of synthetic microbial ecology and community systems biology have the potential to decrypt these complex relationships. We discuss the unique potential of Hydra as an emerging experimental model in microbiome research. In vitro, and in silico approaches the interaction structure of hostassociated microbial communities and the effects of the host on the microbiota and its interactions can be disentangled. Research in the model system Hydra can unify disciplines from molecular genetics to ecology, opening up the opportunity to discover fundamental rules that govern microbiome community stability
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