ESSAY The Hologenome Concept: Helpful or Hollow?

With the increasing appreciation for the crucial roles that microbial symbionts play in the development and fitness of plant and animal hosts, there has been a recent push to interpret evolution through the lens of the “hologenome”—the collective genomic content of a host and its microbiome. But how symbionts evolve and, particularly, whether they undergo natu-ral selection to benefit hosts are complex issues that are associated with several miscon-ceptions about evolutionary processes in host-associated microbial communities. Microorganisms can have intimate, ancient, and/or mutualistic associations with hosts with-out having undergone natural selection to benefit hosts. Likewise, observing host-specific microbial community composition or greater community similarity among more closely related hosts does not imply that symbionts have coevolved with hosts, let alone that they have evolved for the benefit of the host. Although selection at the level of the symbiotic com-munity, or hologenome, occurs in some cases, it should not be accepted as the null hypoth-esis for explaining features of host–symbiont associations. The ubiquity and importance of microorganisms in the lives of plants and animals are eve