oh lord this is beautiful already; fracture points / interfaces / gaps is one of the areas of my fascination, particularly stress on materials – tribology for one example; but I’d never looked in this direction down at this scale in biology; I hadn’t known there WAS research at this level of life.

“An increasing number of organisms are subjected to abiotic (e.g., air, water, and soil quality, temperature), but also biotic (e.g., new pathogens) stressors. These stressors may disturb the chemical and physiological homeostasis of living systems, and thus impact their ecology and evolution. Because eukaryotes are often associated with symbionts, these changes do not only impact the host but rather the holobiont, an assemblage of interacting species. Indeed, stressors can modify the symbiotic community composition and functions directly, but also indirectly through their impact on host physiology. Any disruption of the symbiotic homeostasis can then impact the host fitness. On the other side, several symbionts protect their host against various threats, and they may facilitate the adaptation of the holobiont to the new environment by limiting the negative impact of stress on the host”

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