Abstract:
Both commensals and pathogens alike have innovated host-adapted survival strategies throughout the struggle to maintain evolutionary relevance. Successful microbes have found ways to build symbiotic relationships and hosts have similarly been conditioned to develop the means to benefit from, or at the very least tolerate, their associated microbes. In ever-changing environments like the gastrointestinal tract, high selective pressures call for bacterial-host interactions that contribute to homeostasis. In the intestine, maintaining healthy conditions depends on a careful balancing act between cell proliferation and cell death.