Cameron Wagg, Yann Hautier ... Marcel GA van der Heijden
Soil microbial diversity loss destabilizes the ability of the soil to function because greater diversity is needed to maintain temporal and functional asynchrony among different microbes.
Simulations and experiments on systems containing two different populations of microorganisms show that interactions that benefit at least one of the populations can lead to communities with stable compositions, and that strong cooperation between two populations can lead to communities in which both populations are mixed together.
Veronika Dubinkina, Yulia Fridman ... Sergei Maslov
Multistability and regime shifts are common and species diversity is high in microbial communities when nutrient supplies are balanced and competing species have different stoichiometries of essential nutrients.
Microbial macroecological patterns under coarse-graining are captured by a null model of ecology, a result which was leveraged to successfully predict the relationship between fine and coarse-grained diversity.
There are regularities in how specific nutrients combine together to shape the taxonomic composition of self-assembled communities, with some types of nutrients dominating other types.
Properties of various microbial communities time series, such as the noise color and neutrality, are captured by stochastic generalized Lotka-Volterra equations, even in the absence of interactions.
With mathematical modeling being an important source of insight for microbial communities, we may need to move beyond commonly-used pairwise models that do not capture microbial interactions.
