How microbes evolve and adapt to hosts

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The era of COVID-19 and the need to constantly wash one’s hands and sanitize things have brought microbes to new levels of scrutiny, particularly for their impact on an individual’s health.

While associations between microbes and their hosts, from the beneficial — think probiotics in yogurt — to the harmful — such as with viruses spread by touch — have long been known, little is known about how microbes evolve and how their evolution affects the health of their hosts.

Now, researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found that as microbes evolve and adapt to their unique hosts, they become less beneficial to hosts of other genotypes.

Full article at SciTech Daily: Link