How microbial communities emerge

Virtually all multicellular organisms on Earth live in symbiotic associations with very large and complex microbial communities known as microbiomes. New research has just been published aimed at offering a complete understanding how those relationships form. Computational ecologists explore how associations between complex bacterial communities and multicellular hosts emerge in nature by combining theory with empirical work. The researchers are currently using the proposed framework to investigate microbes inside marine sponges.