Evolutionary perspectives on the human gut microbiome

Abstract

The renewed interest in human gut microbiome research spawned by modern developments in metagenomics resulted in many fascinating new results, but confusion and seeming contradictions are still common in this nascent field. As for other subdisciplines of biology, evolutionary biology serves as a unifying principle in studying host-microbe interactions. However, the range of perspectives offered by evolution is often not considered or fully appreciated in human gut microbiome research. In this chapter we provide a broad overview of evolutionary perspectives on the human gut microbiome, which range from the origin of holobionts to strain-level microbial variation within a host’s lifetime.