Microbiota

A microbiota is "the ecological community of commensal, symbiotic and pathogenic microorganisms that literally share our body space".Joshua Lederberg coined the term, emphasising the importance of microorganisms inhabiting the human body in health and disease. Many scientific articles distinguish microbiome and microbiota to describe either the collective genomes of the microorganisms that reside in an environmental niche or the microorganisms themselves, respectively. However, by the original definitions, these terms are largely synonymous.

The microbes being discussed generally do not cause disease unless they grow abnormally nonpathogenic organisms; they exist in harmony and symbiotically with their hosts. The microbiome and host may have emerged as a unit by the process of integration.

All plants and animals, from protists to humans, live in close association with microbial organisms (see for example the human microbiome). Up until relatively recently, however, biologists have defined the interactions of plants and animals with the microbial world mostly in the context of disease states and of a relatively small number of symbiotic case studies. Organisms do not live in isolation, but have evolved in the context of complex communities. A number of advances have driven a change in the perception of microbiomes, including:

Increasingly, biologists have come to appreciate that microbes make up an important part of an organism's phenotype, far beyond the occasional symbiotic case study.

Pierre-Joseph van Beneden (1809-1894), a Belgian professor at the University of Louvain, developed the concept of commensalism during the nineteenth century. In his 1875 publication Animal Parasites and Messmates, Van Beneden presented 264 examples of commensalism. His conception was widely accepted by his contemporaries and commensalism has continued to be used as a concept right up to the present day: microbiome is clearly linked to commensalism.

There is a strengthening consensus among evolutionary biologists that one should not separate an organism's genes from the context of its resident microbes.

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