Phylosymbiosis: relationships and functional effects of microbial communities across host evolutionary history

Phylosymbiosis was recently proposed to describe the eco-evolutionary pattern whereby the ecological relatedness of host-associated microbial communities parallels the phylogeny of related host species. Here, we analyze the prevalence of phylosymbiosis and its functional significance under highly controlled conditions by characterizing the microbiota of 24 animal species from four different groups (Peromyscus deer mice, Drosophila flies, mosquitoes, Nasonia wasps) and re-evaluate the phylosymbiotic relationships of seven species of wild hominids. We demonstrate three key findings. First, intraspecific microbiota variation is consistently less than interspecific microbiota variation, and microbiota-based models predict host species origin with high accuracy across the dataset. Interestingly, the age of host clade divergence positively associates with the degree of intraspecific microbial community distinguishability within the host clades, spanning recent host speciation (~one million ye...