The identification of horizontally transferred genes, and commonly transferred functions, can provide a window into the selective forces acting on species within an ecosystem.
Leonora S Bittleston, Charles J Wolock ... Anne Pringle
Host characteristics drive the assembly of similar communities within the convergently evolved and geographically distant pitcher ecosystems of carnivorous pitcher plants.
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.
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.
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.
Alexander Lobanov, Samantha Dyckman ... Babak Momeni
Investigating microbial communities in a spatial environment in silico suggests that spatial structure promotes higher coexistence by allowing spatial self-organization, but can hinder coexistence by weakening interactions mediated through diffusible metabolites.
Noise-averaging cooperation (NAC) is a novel theory for the emergence of microbial cross-feeding by which noisy intracellular metabolism can promote cooperation and cross-feeding among cells.
A novel computation tool for microbial community modeling predicts the evolution and diversification of E. coli in laboratory evolution experiments and gives insight into the underlying metabolic processes.
A simple model provides an accessible framework to infer macroscopic parameters of effective resource competition from longitudinal studies of microbial communities.
