Very interesting article. Thanks for posting it. This is kind of like quantum gravity in a way, as it's the shrinking of ideas about ecosystems to the organism

Very interesting article. Thanks for posting it. This is kind of like quantum gravity in a way, as it's the shrinking of ideas about ecosystems to the organismal level. > “This notion [of holobionts] challenges and seeks to replace the concept of a monogenomic individual whose essential identity arises during development, is maintained by the immune system, and which is selected through evolution.” This is fundamentally a "conflict" between two particular ways (out of six that I am aware of) of seeing the word. It is my view that these two ways belong to particular personalities. So basically neither way can fully replace the other, as each way is not satisfactorily explanative to those who prefer the other way of thinking about the world. It's great to have more ideas bouncing around though. These allow the formation and testing of hypotheses that other conceptual frameworks do not. More frameworks lead to more knowledge. > Mixotricha paradoxa, one of those fibre-digesting components, is itself a composite of a protist (a single-celled eukaryote) and four types of bacteria. The wikipedia article for this entity shows it's a really interesting assembly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixotricha_paradoxa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixotricha_paradoxa > Mitochondria generate energy by metabolising glucose, and are found in all eukaryotes. One eukaryote was found in 2016 that lost its mitochondria and made up for the loss by horizontal gene transmission of a pathway from bacteria: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)30263-9 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)... > Pursuing that thought, the firm has found—and now markets—rhizospheric bugs which confer drought-tolerance on cotton, maize, soyabeans and wheat Wow. The other stuff mentioned in this paragraph wasn't a surprise to me, but drought-tolerance is.