A community perspective on the concept of marine holobionts: state-of-the-art, challenges, and future directions

Host-microbe interactions play crucial roles in marine ecosystems, but we still have very little understanding of the mechanisms that govern these relationships, the evolutionary processes that shape them, and their ecological consequences. The holobiontconcept is a renewed paradigm in biology that can help describe and understand these complex systems. It posits that a host and its associated microbiota, living together in a long-lasting relationship, form the holobiont, and have to be studied together, as a coherent biological and functional unit, in order to understand the biology, ecology and evolution of the organisms. Here we discuss critical concepts and opportunities in marine holobiontresearch and identify key challenges in the field. We highlight the potential economic, sociological, and environmental impacts of the holobiontconcept in marine biological, evolutionary, and environmental scienceswith comparisons to terrestrial science whenever appropriate. A deeper understanding of such complex systems, however, will require further technological and conceptual advances. The most significant challenge will be to bridge functional research on simple and tractable model systems and global approaches. This will require scientists to work together as an (inter)active community in order to address, for instance, ecological and evolutionary questions and the roles of holobiontsin biogeochemical cycles.