Thus far, ecological properties of an organism, such as plant specialization and environmental adaptation, have been, needless to say, simply regarded as attributes of the organism encoded by its genome. However, this discovery suggests that, although unseen and therefore unrecognized, endosymbiotic microbial communities might sometimes have a substantial influence on a variety of macroscopic biological phenomena that we observe.

Ref. Tsuchida, T., Koga, R. and Fukatsu, T. (2004) Host plant specialization governed by facultative symbiont. Science 303: 1989.