ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
The role of multilevel selection in host microbiome evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 47 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
47 citing papers in PubMed.
- Multilevel selection in multitype populations.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Towards Key Principles of Host-Associated Microbiome Assembly.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Microbial landscapes in dairy cow diseases: from localized dysbiosis to inter-organ axes.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2026Review
- The key role of cheaters in the persistence of cooperation.BMC biology · 2026Article
- Quantitative genetics of microbiome-mediated traits.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2025Article
- Applying evolutionary theory to understand host-microbiome evolution.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Review
- Within-host microbial selection and multiple microbial generations buffer the loss of host fitness under environmental change.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2025Article
- Little Peacemakers: Microbes Can Promote Nonviolent Conflict Resolution by Their Hosts.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Solitary Bees Acquire and Deposit Bacteria via Flowers: Testing the Environmental Transmission Hypothesis UsingEcology and evolution · 2025Article
- Multilevel selection on individual and group social behaviour in the wild.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Estimates of microbiome heritability across hosts.Nature microbiology · 2024Review
- The key role of cheaters in the persistence of cooperation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Maternal transmission as a microbial symbiont sieve, and the absence of lactation in male mammals.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The importance of host physical niches for the stability of gut microbiome composition.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Modeling endosymbioses: Insights and hypotheses from theoretical approaches.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Contrasted host specificity of gut and endosymbiont bacterial communities in alpine grasshoppers and crickets.ISME communications · 2024Article
- Healthy gut microbiomes are host-controllable microbiomes.Frontiers in microbiology · 2024Article
- A computational framework for resolving the microbiome diversity conundrum.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Partner-assisted artificial selection of a secondary function for efficient bioremediation.iScience · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Animals are associated with a microbiome that can affect their reproductive success. It is, therefore, important to understand how a host and its microbiome coevolve. According to the hologenome concept, hosts and their microbiome form an integrated evolutionary entity, a holobiont, on which selection can potentially act directly. However, this view is controversial, and there is an active debate on whether the association between hosts and their microbiomes is strong enough to allow for selection at the holobiont level. Much of this debate is based on verbal arguments, but a quantitative framework is needed to investigate the conditions under which selection can act at the holobiont level. Here, we use multilevel selection theory to develop such a framework. We found that selection at the holobiont level can in principle favor a trait that is costly to the microbes but that provides a benefit to the host. However, such scenarios require rather stringent conditions. The degree to which microbiome composition is heritable decays with time, and selection can only act at the holobiont level when this decay is slow enough, which occurs when vertical transmission is stronger than horizontal transmission. Moreover, the host generation time has to be short enough compared with the timescale of the evolutionary dynamics at the microbe level. Our framework thus allows us to quantitatively predict for what kind of systems selection could act at the holobiont level.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.