Can Microbial Communities Regenerate? Uniting Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

This book is one entry in a larger series focusing on the current scientific understanding of biological regeneration. Canadian professors Inkpen (philosophy, Mount Allison Univ.) and Doolittle (biochemistry and molecular biology, Dalhousie Univ.) focus on microbiological regeneration—how multiple microbiological entities come together, interact, and regenerate after a disruption. The book lays out the definitions, concepts, and theoretical frameworks for microbial regeneration using both ecology and evolution to arrive at the current scientific understanding of this complex concept. While the book does its best to outline these complicated concepts and their interactions, it would have greatly benefited from a second draft to clarify the internal chapter organizations and the sentence structuring. Readers new to these topics might struggle, but students in these scientific disciplines would benefit from the cross-disciplinary approach.