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Available energy fluxes drive a transition in the diversity, stability, and functional structure of microbial communities
A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences between the microbes and their chemical environment through the...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2019
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6386421/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30721227 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006793 |
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author | Marsland, Robert Cui, Wenping Goldford, Joshua Sanchez, Alvaro Korolev, Kirill Mehta, Pankaj |
author_facet | Marsland, Robert Cui, Wenping Goldford, Joshua Sanchez, Alvaro Korolev, Kirill Mehta, Pankaj |
author_sort | Marsland, Robert |
collection | PubMed |
description | A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences between the microbes and their chemical environment through the consumption and production of metabolites. By analyzing a generalized consumer resource model that explicitly includes cross-feeding, stochastic colonization, and thermodynamics, we show that complex microbial communities generically exhibit a transition as a function of available energy fluxes from a “resource-limited” regime where community structure and stability is shaped by energetic and metabolic considerations to a diverse regime where the dominant force shaping microbial communities is the overlap between species’ consumption preferences. These two regimes have distinct species abundance patterns, different functional profiles, and respond differently to environmental perturbations. Our model reproduces large-scale ecological patterns observed across multiple experimental settings such as nestedness and differential beta diversity patterns along energy gradients. We discuss the experimental implications of our results and possible connections with disorder-induced phase transitions in statistical physics. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6386421 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2019 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-63864212019-03-08 Available energy fluxes drive a transition in the diversity, stability, and functional structure of microbial communities Marsland, Robert Cui, Wenping Goldford, Joshua Sanchez, Alvaro Korolev, Kirill Mehta, Pankaj PLoS Comput Biol Research Article A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences between the microbes and their chemical environment through the consumption and production of metabolites. By analyzing a generalized consumer resource model that explicitly includes cross-feeding, stochastic colonization, and thermodynamics, we show that complex microbial communities generically exhibit a transition as a function of available energy fluxes from a “resource-limited” regime where community structure and stability is shaped by energetic and metabolic considerations to a diverse regime where the dominant force shaping microbial communities is the overlap between species’ consumption preferences. These two regimes have distinct species abundance patterns, different functional profiles, and respond differently to environmental perturbations. Our model reproduces large-scale ecological patterns observed across multiple experimental settings such as nestedness and differential beta diversity patterns along energy gradients. We discuss the experimental implications of our results and possible connections with disorder-induced phase transitions in statistical physics. Public Library of Science 2019-02-05 /pmc/articles/PMC6386421/ /pubmed/30721227 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006793 Text en © 2019 Marsland et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Marsland, Robert Cui, Wenping Goldford, Joshua Sanchez, Alvaro Korolev, Kirill Mehta, Pankaj Available energy fluxes drive a transition in the diversity, stability, and functional structure of microbial communities |
title | Available energy fluxes drive a transition in the diversity, stability, and functional structure of microbial communities |
title_full | Available energy fluxes drive a transition in the diversity, stability, and functional structure of microbial communities |
title_fullStr | Available energy fluxes drive a transition in the diversity, stability, and functional structure of microbial communities |
title_full_unstemmed | Available energy fluxes drive a transition in the diversity, stability, and functional structure of microbial communities |
title_short | Available energy fluxes drive a transition in the diversity, stability, and functional structure of microbial communities |
title_sort | available energy fluxes drive a transition in the diversity, stability, and functional structure of microbial communities |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6386421/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30721227 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006793 |
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