The community-function landscape of microbial consortia

Sánchez, Álvaro; Bajić, Djordje; Díaz-Colunga, Juan; Skwara, Abigail; Vila, Jean C. C.; Kuehn, Seppe

doi:10.32942/osf.io/s4wau

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 102 publications

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“…From our work, we can predict when those long indirect interaction pathways cannot be ignored or even simply added up. In such instances there is no choice but to change perspective, and focus our efforts towards robust ecosystem or community-level properties of the natural system under study (Goldford et al ., 2018; Bergelson et al ., 2021; Sanchez et al ., 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How collectively integrated are ecological communities?

Zelnik

Galiana

Barbier

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Are the population dynamics of species mainly determined by direct interactions with predators, preys and conspecifics? Or, instead, are those dynamics more dependent on indirect feedbacks that ripple across the whole interaction network? Here we show that, from a basic spectral feature of the interaction network, we can predict the length of indirect interaction pathways that contribute to community-level dynamical patterns, such as the depth of a perturbation's reach, or the contribution of biotic processes to realized species niches. In doing so, we propose a measure of collectivity that integrates existing approaches to community complexity, collective integration and indirect interactions. By revisiting classic concepts of theoretical community ecology, our work proposes an original perspective on the question of to what degree communities are more than loose collections of species or simple interaction motifs. This perspective can help clarify when reductionist approaches, focusing on particular species and small interaction motifs, ought to suffice or fail when applied to ecosystems.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How collectively integrated are ecological communities?

Zelnik

Galiana

Barbier

et al. 2022

Preprint

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“…point towards new avenues of exploration for microbial macroecology. There is increasing evidence that the functional profiles of experimental communities tend to follow quantitative rules that are amenable to mathematical modeling [72][73][74][75]. Extending microbial macroecology beyond patterns of abundance to the level of function embodies the original physiological and energetic breadth that allowed macroecology to advance our understanding of macroorganisms [4].…”

Section: /32mentioning

confidence: 99%

Macroecological laws in experimental microbial communities

Shoemaker¹,

Sánchez²,

Grilli³

2023

Preprint

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Historically, ecology has benefited by characterizing statistical patterns of biodiversity within and across communities. This approach, known as macroecology, has achieved considerable success in microbial ecology in recent years, having identified universal patterns of diversity and abundance that can be captured by effective models that do not require interactions between community members. Experimentation has simultaneously played a crucial role in the field's development, as the manipulation of high-replication time-series has revealed novel forces that govern community dynamics. However, there remains a gap between microbial experiments performed in the laboratory and macroecological patterns documented in natural systems. Here, we work to bridge the gap between the experimental manipulation of communities and their macroecological effects. Using high-replication time-series of experimental microbial communities, we demonstrate that macroecological laws observed in nature can be readily recapitulated in a laboratory setting and unified under the Stochastic Logistic Model of growth (SLM). We find that demographic manipulations and their effect on community-level variation can alter empirical patterns in a manner that diverges from our predictions, though the predictive capacity of the SLM can be restored by incorporating explicit experimental details. Finally, we demonstrate the extent that experimental manipulations are capable of altering macroecological patterns under the SLM, establishing a demarcation between macroecological effects we can and cannot observe in a laboratory setting.

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“…This question can be broken down into two more basic problems. How do species traits map onto community-level properties [40,42]? And how does evolution explore the trait space?…”

Section: How Is the Repeatability Of Evolution At The Community Level...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, most species belong to ecological communities where they interact with one another by competing for resources, parasitizing, cooperating, etc. These interactions endow communities with emergent properties, such as diversity, productivity, function, etc., that depend on but cannot be reduced to individual-level properties [37][38][39][40][41][42][43]. Such community-level properties are part of the environment in which community-member species evolve and to which they adapt.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolutionary repeatability of emergent properties of ecological communities

Venkataram¹,

Kryazhimskiy²

2022

Preprint

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Most species belong to ecological communities where their interactions give rise to emergent community-level properties, such as diversity and productivity. Understanding and predicting how these properties change over time has been a major goal in ecology, with important practical implications for sustainability and human health. Less attention has been paid to the fact that community-level properties can also change because member species evolve. Yet, our ability to predict long-term eco-evolutionary dynamics hinges on how repeatably community-level properties change as a result of species evolution. Here, we review studies of evolution of both natural and experimental communities and make the case that community-level properties at least sometimes evolve repeatably. We discuss challenges faced in investigations of evolutionary repeatability. In particular, only a handful of studies enable us to quantify repeatability. We argue that quantifying repeatability at the community level is critical for approaching what we see as three major open questions in the field: (1) Is the observed degree of repeatability surprising? (2) How is evolutionary repeatability at the community level related to repeatability at the level of traits of member species? (3) What factors affect repeatability? We outline some theoretical and empirical approaches to addressing these questions. Advances in these directions will not only enrich our basic understanding of evolution and ecology but will also help us predict eco-evolutionary dynamics.

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The community-function landscape of microbial consortia

Cited by 5 publications

References 102 publications

How collectively integrated are ecological communities?

How collectively integrated are ecological communities?

Macroecological laws in experimental microbial communities

Evolutionary repeatability of emergent properties of ecological communities

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