Analysis of Animals in a Bacterial World Article by Margaret McFall-Ngai - Assignment Example

Reading report 1. The Goal of the review article For the last two decades, the extensive use of genomic and genetic methods has revealed that animals live in a bacterial world, which has astonished in its diversity and ubiquity. The goal of this review article is to examine how people understanding about the enormous range of interactions between animals and bacteria, whether in intimate symbioses or shared ecosystem has affected people’s understanding about the biology of animal (3229). Purposely, the authors aim at highlighting the current intellectual and technological advancements have highly contributed to changing the way people think about five critical questions: how bacteria facilitated the evolution and origin of animal; how bacteria and animal affect genomes of one another; how the development of a normal animal depends on bacteria; how homeostasis is sustained between animals and symbionts; and how our understanding about many animal-bacteria interaction levels is deepened by ecological approaches. The authors seek to come up answers to these questions and challenge biologists to carry out extra research about these interactions as well as investigating relationships between animals and bacteria. All this will deepen our understanding about the natural world. 2. The major questions in animal-bacteria symbioses and evolution that the authors tried to address The major questions in animal-bacteria symbioses and evolution that the authors tried to address are: how bacteria facilitated the evolution and origin of animal; how bacteria and animal affect genomes of one another; how the development of a normal animal depends on bacteria; how homeostasis is sustained between animals and symbionts; and how our understanding about many animal-bacteria interaction levels is deepened by ecological approaches (3229). 3. Bacteria and the origin of animals Understanding the evolvement of the interaction between animals and bacteria may reveal to us the origin of ecological aspects that are behind such interactions. Animals are believed to have diverged from the protistan ancestors between 700 to 800 million years ago and 3 million years after the origin of the bacteria life and one million years after the appearance of first eukaryotic cell. Therefore, today’s relationship between bacteria and protists, from predating to obligating as well as beneficial symbiosis, were already present during the appearance of first animals (3230). Paying attention to the early eukaryote-bacteria interactions provides biologists with essential understanding of the evolution of metazoan from multicellularity to morphological complexity. Choanoflagellate and animal protists can be considered as one group based on cellular and molecular data. This is a group that that originated from a similar choanoflagellate ancestor. There are two types of choanoflagellate behaviors that are the key to animal origin. These behaviors include predation and colony formation. This means that current choanoflagellates have adhesion proteins and animal signaling homologs that are as a result of bactivory’s facilitators. Diverse animals react to the signals of bacteria as triggers for behavior or morphogenesis. Therefore, discovering that one choanoflagellate reacts to signals from one bacterium in order to begin colony formation gives a hint of the ancient bacteria involving in multicellularity initiation. 4. How bacterial symbionts improve their animal host’s physiology The interaction between bacteria hologenomes and animals is not only historical but also important because it improves animal host’s physiology. By using the more varied inherent repertoire that is present in the bacteria partners, the host animal is able to expand the potential of its metabolism, therefore expanding both responsiveness to environmental changes and ecological adaptability. For example, a large number of invertebrates have intracellular symbionts, which have genes that encode metabolic abilities that animals don’t have such vital amino acid synthesis (3231). In addition, some marine invertebrates that survive on algae have algal plastids, which is an active photo-synthetically symbionts. This behavior enables the host animal to make use of photo-synthate as their source of food for a long period. These metabolic benefits help the host animal to survive by adapting to environmental changes and noncompetitive behaviors such as (feeding poor-nutrient foods like plant sap) and noncompetitive environments such as oligotrophic habitats. 5. Importance of understanding animal-bacteria interaction Understanding the relationship between animals and bacteria is very important because it provides us with important insights of the great question of the benefits and negatives impacts of these interrelationships. It is of the essence that human beings understand the origin of the interactions between animals and bacteria for the purpose of maintaining the animal’s health (3230). The interactions between animals and bacteria have both positive and negative impacts and a full understanding of these interactions will help scientists in their investigations on how to control these negative impacts. Although most research about animal-bacteria interaction focus on vertebrate and human modelsy8stems, similar interactions also occur in other animals. Thinking about the colonization of bacteria to animals species as an ecological phenomenon provides scientists with further clarity on the impacts that bacteria bring to the host animal. An ecological perspective will influence our understanding about their roles in biology. 6. Animal gut evolution As ancient animals diversified, the interactions between animals and bacteria continued to change evolution into new forms. Bacteria started to play new roles in the nutrition of animals. Bacteria served not only as preys but also manufacturers of digestible particle in the gut of animal. This new role has become a more diverse one following the tubular gut evolution, with passage of the intake food from mouth through digestion process to anus in ka one-way direction. The influence of bacteria on the evolution of gut certainly strengthened with the successive coelom origin, a cavity of the animal body where the body organs are hanged. The coelom advent made regional specialization and gut elongation possible, hence facilitating ingestion of massive food and storing some for later digestion (3230). Although the ability on which bacteria have aided gut evolution is understood, this is different from other animals such as ruminants whose radiation is undoubtedly believed to be enabled by their gut association with microbiota. 7. Views about the article The content of this article is very important because it provides us with a full understanding of the interaction between animals and bacteria. I think all parts of this review are well formulated and detailed and therefore, I don’t see any need of incorporating more changes. By reading the entire article, an individual will be able to come off with the answers of the big questions stated in introductory part of the article. The authors emphasize the need of integrating microbiology and symbiosis into biology education. Since education is revolutionary, reformulating the current educational goals will be of great importance because it will aid in helping students understand animal-bacteria interactions thus influencing them to carry out extra research on the matter at hand. This way, further understanding about animal-bacteria interactions will be achieved thus helping scientists realize new ways of sustaining the health of both animals and bacteria. Work cited McFall-Ngai, Margaret, et al. "Animals in a bacterial world, a new imperative for the life sciences." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 110.9 (2013): 3229-3236. Read More