Zoological Institute, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Kiel, Germany.
Gut Microbes. 2012 Jul-Aug;3(4):345-51. doi: 10.4161/gmic.20660. Epub 2012 Jun 12.
Any multicellular organism may be considered a metaorganism or holobiont-comprised of the macroscopic host and synergistic interdependence with bacteria, archaea, fungi, viruses, and numerous other microbial and eukaryotic species including algal symbionts. 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. Dissecting the fundamental principles that underlie all host-microbe interactions requires simple animal models with only a few specific bacterial species. Here I present Hydra as such a model with one of the simplest epithelia in the animal kingdom, with the availability of a fully sequenced genome and numerous genomic tools, and with few associated bacterial species.
任何多细胞生物都可以被视为一个超个体或整体生物——由宏观宿主和与其协同共生的细菌、古菌、真菌、病毒以及许多其他微生物和真核生物物种组成，包括藻类共生体。在这些联合体中，定义单个微生物-宿主的对话是理解整个关联功能的必经之路，但这也是一个具有挑战性的步骤。剖析所有宿主-微生物相互作用的基本原则需要使用具有少数几种特定细菌的简单动物模型。在这里，我提出了水螅作为这样一个模型，它具有动物王国中最简单的上皮细胞之一，拥有一个全序列基因组和许多基因组工具，并且相关的细菌物种很少。
