Interdisciplinary Workshop on Holobionts

Microbes play a significant role in the evolution, development, health, and ecological interactions of multicellular organisms. The importance of microbial interactions is now widely recognized and at the center of many new research initiatives across the life sciences. Part of this emerging research has focused on reconceptualizing all macroorganisms as “holobionts”, defined as a host and all its microbial symbionts, with the genomic complement of all partners becoming the “hologenome”. There has been extensive debate about the importance and need for such a reconceptualization, and how it will shape research and our understanding of the living world moving forward.

This workshop is the second workshop organized within Thomas Pradeu’s ERC-funded project IDEM (“Immunity, DEvelopment, and the Microbiota: Understanding the Continuous Construction of Biological Identity”). It will bring together researchers from diverse disciplines (microbiology, evolutionary biology, ecology, pathology, neuroscience, medicine, philosophy of science) working on holobionts and host-microbe associations, in order to foster interdisciplinary communication, investigate whether there are any particular insights or fruitful general principles that emerge from investigations across fields, and hopefully stimulate collaborative research for the future.